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"'' - A PRIMER 

OF 

American Literature 



RICHARDSON 



NEWnr REVISED EDITION 



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LiBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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Chap. Copyright No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



A PRIMER 

OF 

AMERICAN LITERATURE 

BY 

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 

NE WL V RE VISED EDITION 

WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING THE 

PORTRAITS AND HOMES OF EIGHT AMERICAN 

AUTHORS 

SEVENTY-FIRST THOUSAND 




HOv\\'^-'?>''^ 



BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(&^z $aitiecj5iDe press, Cambciti0e 

1S96 



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Copyright, 1878, 1883, and 1896, 
By CHARLES F. RICHARDSON. 

All 7'igkts reserved. 



^.w.. 



LC Control Number 




2004 530057 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

1620- 1775. 

PAGE 

1. The Beginning i 

2. The Theological Era 3 

3. Increase and Cotton Mather .... 4 

4. Eliot's Indian Bible 6 

5. Roger Williams 7 

6. Other Writers of the Seventeenth Century 8 

7. Yale College .9 

8. Jonathan Edwards 10 

9. The Followers of Edwards . . . . .12 

10. Benjamin Franklin . 13 

11. Franklin as a Writer 14 

12. Franklin as a Scientist and Diplomatist . 15 

13. Other Writers of the Eighteenth Century . 15 



CHAPTER II. 
1775-1812. 

1. The Revolutionary Period 18 

2. George Washington as a Writer .... 18 

3. Thomas Jefferson 19 

4. The Federalist 20 

5. Thomas Paine 21 

6. Poets 22 

7. The First Novelist 23 

8. Historians and Other Writers .... 23 



IV 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER III. 



1812-1861. 



I. 

2. 

J- 
4- 

5- 
6. 

/• 
8. 

9- 
10. 
II. 
12. 

13- 

14. 

15- 

16. 

17. 

.18. 
19. 
20. 
21, 
22. 

23- 
24. 
25. 
26. 
27. 
28. 
29. 
30- 
31. 
32. 



Theological Changes 
William Ellery Channing 
Other Religious Writers 
The Knickerbocker School 

W^ASHINGTON IrVING . 

James Kirke Paulding 
Joseph Rodman Drake . 
Fitz-Greene Halleck . 
Other Early Poets 
William Cullen Bryant . 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
Longfellow's Poeinis . 
Longfellow's Other W'orks 
John Greenleaf W^hittier 
Holmes's Poems . 
Holmes's Prose Works 
James Russell Lowell . 
Edgar Allan Poe 
Other Poets 

Orators 

Historians .... 

George Bancroft 

William Hickling Prescott 

John Lothrop Motley 

Francis Parkman 

Other Historians 

Fiction — James Fentmore Cooper 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 

Other Novelists .... 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Other Transcendentalists . 

Miscellaneous Writers 

Scientific and Special Writers 



CONTENTS, V 
CHAPTER IV. 

AFTER 1861. 

I. Literature of the Civil War ,,*,']'] 

%. Poets 79 

3. Bayard Taylor 80 

4. Richard Henry Stoddard ..... 81 

5. Edmund Clarence Stedman 81 

6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich 82 

7. Walt W^hitman 84 

8. Other Poets 85 

9. Francis Bret Harte ^'j 

10. The American Short Story 88 

11. William Dean Howells 91 

12. Henry James, Jr. 93 

13. Edward Eggleston 94 

14. George W. Cable 95 

15. Romanticists 95 

16. Edward Everett Hale 9^ 

17. Louisa May Alcott 99 

t8. American Humor 99 

19. Charles Dudley Warner 102 

20. Essayists ^°^ 

21. Recent Historians 105 

Helps for Further Study .... 17, 25, 75, 108 

A Course of Reading 109 

Chronological Table 113 

APPENDIX. 

Portraits and Homes of 

William Cullen Bryant. 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
John Greenleaf Whittier. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
James Russell Lowell. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



A PRIMER 

OF 

AMERICAN LITERATURE, 



CHAPTER I. 

1620-1775. 



I. The Beginning. — As soon as the English 
colonists landed on American shores, at Jamestown 
and Plymouth, they began to think of the estab- 
lishment of schools of sound learning : in Virginia 
for the purpose of educating the Indians, and* in 
Massachusetts Bay for the supply of church pas- 
tors. By 16 19 the proposed Virginia University 
possessed, as gifts from English donors, fifteen 
thousand acres of land and fifteen hundred pounds 
in money ; and its early establishment at Henrico, 
on the James River, was prevented only by a gen- 
eral Indian massacre on March 22, 1622, when 
three hundred and forty persons, including the 
superintendent of the university, lost their lives. 
Nothing further was done toward establishing a 
Virginia college until 1660, and the College of 
William and Mary, the outcome of the original 



2 A PRIMER OF AMEHrICAN LITER A TURE. 

idea, did not receive its charter until 1693. The 
Puritans of Massachusetts were more fortunate and 
more prudent than the Cavaliers of Virginia, for 
they suffered no loss by any extensive massacre, 
and they depended upon themselves instead of 
looking for help from England, where, indeed, they 
had few friends. Many of them were men of 
soundly trained minds, and some were graduates 
of Cambridge University in the mother country. 
Their " school or college '* at Newtown (afterwards 
called Cambridge), near Boston, was begun in 1636 
with only four hundred pounds in money ; but two 
years later it received a sum amounting, it is sup- 
posed, to seven or eight hundred pounds, together 
with a respectable library, by the will of John Har- 
vard, the young Charlestown minister whose name 
Harvard University now bears. From that time its 
income was small but sure, and its existence during 
the latter part of the seventeenth century did much 
to give Massachusetts the literary start which the 
greater wealth and the imported instructors of the 
Virginia institution could not offset. In the north- 
ern colonies the village was the distributing centre ; 
in the southern, the planter's mansion ; hence the 
greater prominence, in the former, of the meeting- 
house, the town-meeting, the school, and the print- 
ing-press ; while, in the more sparsely settled 
slave-holding communities south of Philadelphia, 
intellectual force made itself most manifest, even 
from the first, in law and politics. Here and there, 



THE THEOLOGICAL ERA 3 

however, book-making — or at least religious and 
political pamphleteering — appeared with creditable 
promptness ; and those colonists who first taught or 
wrote have their posthumous reward in the most 
vigorous offshoot that the literature of any nation 
has ever been able to put forth. American litera- 
ture has a right to a share in the heritage of the 
countrymen of Alfred and Chaucer and Shake- 
speare ; but its enforced independence and the 
influences of its new surroundings have given it 
character and deserts of its own. 

2. The Theological Era. — At the outset Amer- 
ican writings were imitative, and essentially unlit- 
erary and unimportant; the first writers w^ere of 
English birth and education, and the early col- 
leges were closely fashioned after the Oxford and 
Cambridge pattern, in which divinity and the '' hu- 
manities '' held the first place. The settlers of 
Massachusetts were men who had fought and suf- 
fered for their religious opinions, and they naturally 
held them with considerable firmness, as opposed 
to the Church of England on the one hand, and the 
Baptists and Quakers on the other. So long as the 
influence of the Puritans and their descendants was 
predominant, it was natural that the affairs of the 
soul should be uppermost ; and not until politics 
began to interest the colonists in a vital manner did 
religious books and tracts cease to form the bulk of 
the issues of the press. Novels and plays were 
unknown ; verse was didactic, devotional, or satiri- 



4 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

cal ; historical tracts were almost hopelessly pre- 
judiced by the theological or personal opinions of 
their writers ; and philosophy became an important 
study only as a means of religious defense. One of 
the first issues of the printing-press set up at Cam- 
bridge in 1639 was the Bay Fsalm Book, a wooden 
metrical version by New England divines whose 
sincerity surpassed their lyrical powers. This was 
the first book written and printed at home, for 
though George Sandys, an English gentleman con- 
nected with the Virginia company, had made, on 
the banks of the James River, a tolerable transla- 
tion of Ovid, he printed it in London. 

3. Increase and Cotton Mather. — Nearly 
every minister who thought he had anything to say, 
and possessed the means of getting it printed, wrote 
on some biblical or theological theme. The titles 
were often of great length. The Application of Re- 
demption by the Effectual Work of the Word a?id 
Spirit of Christ was as brief as the average ; and 
the interest excited in such works is shown by the 
fact that this treatise reached a second edition 
after the death of the author, Rev. Thomas Hooker, 
the founder of Hartford. Of all the theological 
(vriters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
Increase Mather and his son Cotton were the most 
voluminous. The publications of the former num- 
bered eighty-five, and of the latter no less than 
three hundred and eighty-two. Increase Mather 
was born at Dorchester, and graduated at Harvard 



INCREASE AND COTTON MATHER. 5 

in 1656, though he deemed an additional European 
training necessary, and took a degree at Dublin two 
years later. He was president of Harvard between 
1685 and 1 701, and had some success in his efforts 
to be preacher, diplomat, and educator at the same 
time. His writings have little literary value, though 
his Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences 
is a naively interesting compound of superstition 
and story-telling. Cotton Mather inherited all his 
father's zeal, together with the bookish tastes of 
his grandfather, John Cotton, of the First Church 
in Boston. He graduated at Harvard in 1678, 
and, having overcome a painful habit of stammering, 
became his father's colleague in the North Church, 
Boston, in 1684. The youth was then only twenty- 
one years of age, but his head had been crammed 
with much undigested knowledge. At tw^elve he 
was well along in Hebrew, and had mastered the 
leading Latin and Greek authors ; and his daily 
life was from the first a piece of systematic machin- 
ery. Mather was a firm supporter of the doctrines 
of extreme Calvinistic theology, and to him devils 
and angels were as real as his own family. In 
witchcraft he fully believed, in common with most 
of the wise men of his time ; and his first important 
book, Memorable Provide?tces relating to Witchcraft^ 
appeared in 1689, three years before the Salem 
executions, which Mather justified. The Wonders 
of the Invisible World., issued in 1693, gives an 
account of these executions, without any show of 



6 A PRIMER OF AMERICA?/ LITER A TURE, 

compassion, or any intimation that human beings, 
and not evil spirits, were being put to death. And 
yet this cold, stern man was a life-long worker for 
sailors, prisoners, Indians, and the suffering and 
oppressed. Mather wrote on a multitude of sub- 
jects, but the work on which his reputation chiefly 
rests is the Magnalia Christi Americaiia^ published 
in London in 1702, — a storehouse of ecclesiastical, 
civil, and educational history, together with many 
biographical sketches. As a collection of facts it 
is an authority, though not an unquestionable one ; 
and in those passages which are colored by the 
writer's prejudices it is easy to detach the true from 
the false. Mather died in 1728, and left a great 
gap in what the Massachusetts colonists deemed 
the literature of the time. By his side the other 
early clergymen of New England, with two excep- 
tions, must take an inferior place, for they equaled 
him in zeal and fertility, but not in ability. 

4. Eliot's Indian Bible. — John Eliot, the 
" Apostle to the Indians," was born in England 
and educated at the University of Cambridge, 
coming to Boston in 163 1, and accepting as his 
life-mission, the next year, the conversion of the 
Indians, who were evidently, in his opinion, the 
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Having 
learned their language by the aid of an Indian ser- 
vant in his family, he began preaching in Nonantum, 
now Newton, in 1646. Threats did not affect him, 
and little churches of natives were slowly gathered 



ROGER WILLIAMS. 7 

in the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, 
twenty-four of his converts aiding the industrious 
Eliot in carrying them on. He had troubles with 
the colonists, whom he deterred from extirpating 
the Indians in 1675, ^"^ whom he offended by his 
Christian Commonwealth^ published in England in 
1660, — a work against which seditious intent was 
charged. Eliot wrote an English harmony of the 
Gospels, an Indian grammar, and some lesser 
works ; but his chief monument of industry and 
scholarship is his translation of the entire Bible 
into the Indian tongue. This appeared in two parts, 
the New Testament in 1661, and the w^hole Bible in 
1663, being the labor of the unaided Eliot. It is 
worthy of mention as the first Bible, in any lan- 
guage, printed in British America, and still remains 
one of the most noteworthy contributions to philo- 
logy made in this country, though its value as a 
christianizing agent was of course temporary. 

5. Roger Williams. — The Puritans, although 
they were in a majority, and controlled religious 
and social affairs in New England with an iron 
hand, were not without opponents. Of these the 
most prominent was Roger Williams, a Church of 
England clergyman who had become a non-con- 
formist just before sailing for America, in 1630. 
For five years he was in every way a political and 
theological thorn in the side of the colony of Mas- 
sachusetts Bay, though many of his principles were 
thoroughly in accord with what is now considered 



8 A PRIME R OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

truth and progress. To escape banishment to Eng- 
land, he went, with four followers, to the site of the 
present city of Providence, and set up a community 
in which secular and religious affairs were divorced. 
Becoming a Baptist in 1639, he founded a church 
the same year, which he quitted after a few months. 
The remainder of his life was mainly spent in 
Providence, though he lived in London for some 
time, where he was surprised to find John Milton 
as versatile as himself, and considerably more pro- 
found. The Quakers were freely admitted to Provi- 
dence ; but Williams and George Fox carried on 
sharp controversies, and the former engaged in 
public debate with the Quaker champion. His 
Bloody Tenent of Persecution^ Hireling Ministry none 
of Chrisfs, and Experi^nents of Spiritual Life and 
Health are his principal works, but their present 
value is not great. Williams's whole career shows 
what a man of sincerity, force, and love of liberty 
can accomplish, though his powers be hindered by 
a certain instability and superficiality. 

6. Other Writers of the Seventeenth Cen- 
tury. — Captain John Smith was a voluminous 
but sometimes hasty and untrustworthy narrator of 
his own adventures. His residence in America 
was so brief that in no true sense do his stories of 
travel belong to American literature. Nathaniel 
Ward, minister at Ipswich, pubHshed in 1647 ^ 
sharp satire on English social life, called The 
Simple Cobbler of Agawa?n, Governor John W^in- 



YALE COLLEGE. 9 

throp's valuable history of New England, in the 
form of a journal between 1630 and 1649, was not 
fully published until 1826. The manuscript of 
another governor's journal, William Bradford's His- 
tory of Plymouth Plantation (1602 - 1646), was lost 
until 1855, and first completely published in 1856. 
It had formed the basis of Nathaniel Morton's New 
England^ s Memorial^ 1669. Both of these records, 
written by prominent actors in the scenes described, 
are historical documents of solid importance ; of the 
two, Bradford's excels in strength and Winthrop's 
in form. The honor of the first publication in New 
England, of a volume of original verse belongs to 
Anne Bradstreet, whose collected works appeared 
in 1678. Some of the poems are by no means 
devoid of merit, though disfigured by awkwardness 
and stiffness of style. Peter Folger, Benjamin 
Franklin's grandfather, wrote a long doggerel en- 
titled A Looking Glass for the Ti7nes, It was hard 
to write anything but doggerel so long as the cur- 
rent versions of the Psalms were in vo2:ue. Michael 
Wiggles worth's Day of D 00771 (1662) is a sulphurous 
poem on the day of judgment, with some strong 
lines, one of which devotes to non-elect infants 
*' the easiest room in hell." It was very popular in 
its day, running through nine editions in America 
and two in England. 

7. Yale College. — In the year 1700 some Con- 
necticut ministers met at New Haven, and talked 
over the plan of establishing a college in the col- 



10 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

ony, a subject which had been broached as early 
as 1647. Meeting again in Branford the same 
year, they deposited forty books on a table, each de- 
claring as he laid down his parcel, " I give these 
books for the founding of a college in this colony.'^ 
In its early years the new institution led a wander- 
ing and not altogether peaceful life at Killingworth, 
Saybrook, and Milford, but was finally located in 
New Haven in 17 16. The Saybrook Platform 
(Congregational) had been made binding on the 
officers in 1708. The religious teaching of the 
college was somewhat more conservative than that 
at Harvard, even in the eighteenth century ; but 
the publications of its officers and graduates were 
fewer, partly in consequence of the lack of a pub- 
lishing centre in the colony. Philosophy, however, 
was from the first a prominent study, and to this 
fact is due, in some measure, the subsequent career 
of the earliest of American metaphysicians. 

8. Jonathan Edwards was born in East Wind- 
sor, Connecticut, in 1703, graduated at Yale in 
1720, was a tutor there between 1724 and 1726, 
was pastor in Northampton and Stockbridge, and 
in 1757 was elected president of the College of 
New Jersey at Princeton, dying there in March of 
the next year, after holding office less than three 
months. As a mere youth he began the study of 
mental science, and took up the task of showing 
the harmony between the Calvinistic theology and 
the conclusions of philosophy. Locke he mastered 



JON A THAN ED WA RDS. 1 1 

at thirteen, and afterwards studied other accessi- 
ble authorities ; but Locke's influence was always 
strong in his mind. In 1746 he wrote a Treatise 
on the Religious Affections^ in which he showed what 
he deemed to be the marks of true religion. An 
Inquiry into the Qiialificatio7is for Full Communion 
followed : a work in which he laid down the prin- 
ciple, since maintained in the New England Con- 
gregational churches, that true conversion and a 
correct life should be prerequisites for admission to 
the Lord's Supper. This apparently obvious opin- 
ion was not shared by his Northampton church, 
and he was compelled to leave it, undertaking the 
duties of missionary to the Stockbridge Indians. 
In Stockbridge, between 175 1 and 1754, he wrote 
his famous treatise on the freedom of the will, the 
full title of which was A Careful and Strict Inquiry 
into the Moder?t Notion of that Freedom of Will 
which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency^ 
Virtue and Vice^ Reward and Punishment^ Fraise 
and Blame. His other works were not few, but 
upon this chiefly rests his reputation as philosopher 
and theologian. It was designed to show that 
Calvinistic notions of God's moral government are 
not contrary to the common-sense of mankind, but 
in strict consonance therewith. Edwards main- 
tained that the will is not self-determined, and that 
the assertion of absence of certainty in the universe 
is inconsistent with any correct idea of a ruling 
power. Some English necessitarians promptly 



12 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

hailed Edwards as one of their number, but he re- 
pudiated the connection, and declared that man's 
sinful disposition was man's greatest sin, far from 
being an excuse for wrong-doing. From its first 
appearance until the present time, the treatise has 
been the subject of sharp criticism, both by Calvin- 
ists and Arminians. Reduced to its lowest terms, 
it declares that we choose to choose to choose — 
and so on — to act freely, and that such choice 
absolutely fetters freedom of action. 

9. The Followers of Edwards. — The princi- 
pal leaders, in the eighteenth century, of the school 
of didactic philosophy which Edwards shaped were 
Samuel Hopkins and Timothy Dwight. Hopkins 
studied theology under Edwards, of whom he pub- 
lished a biography. His System of Theology ap- 
peared in 1793, and " Hopkinsianism " was a 
common term in New England for many years. 
Hopkins was one of the first to oppose slavery ; 
he caused it to be abolished in Rhode Island^ and 
formed a plan for colonizing and evangelizing 
Africa with free negroes. Timothy Dwight was 
president of Yale between 1795 and 1817. His 
Theology Explained and Defended (18 18) consisted 
of one hundred and seventy-three sermons. While 
adhering in the main to the principles of Edwards, 
he dissented in minor points, and considerably 
popularized the system. Dr. Dwight, who was one 
of the most accomplished scholars of his time, also 
wrote verse of the orthodox eighteenth-century 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 13 

iambic-pentameter order, ranging in theme from 
The Conquest of Canaan to the view from Greenfield 
Hill in his own Connecticut ; and a book of trav- 
els, though his explorations extended no farther 
than New England and New York. 

10. Benjamin Franklin. — The eighteenth cen- 
tury gradually became rich in the names of potent 
Americans, one of the most remarkable of whom 
was Benjamin Franklin, who had all the versatility 
of Roger Williams and the Mathers, and worked 
in a far wider field. Franklin, the fifteenth of a 
family of seventeen children, was born in Boston 
in 1706, his father being a tallow-chandler, and 
his mother the daughter of Peter Folger, a man 
of some literary ability. Early apprenticed to his 
brother James as a printer, Franklin read every- 
thing he could lay hands upon, and was espe- 
cially fond of Addison's Spectator, The itch for 
writing was soon manifest, and he began to print 
pieces on public affairs in The New England 
Courant^ his brother's newspaper. The people 
read and liked them, but they caused a disagree- 
ment with his brother, and in 1723 young Franklin 
ran away to New York and Philadelphia, where he 
went to work as a journeyman printer. In 1730 
he bought the Fe?insylvania Gazette, then two years 
old ; and soon became a power in politics and 
society. Through his efforts a library was started 
in Philadelphia in 1731 ; the American Philosoph- 
ical Society in 1743 ; and the Academy of Philadel- 



14 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

phia, afterwards the University of Pennsylvania, in 
1749. In 1753 he became postmaster-general for 
the colonies, and was frequently commissioner be- 
tween them and England. In 1766 he secured the 
repeal of the obnoxious Stamp Act; in 1775 he 
went to the Continental Congress ; and in 1776 he 
helped to draft the Declaration of Independence, 
which he signed. Between that year and 1785 he 
was employed abroad in various diplomatic func- 
tions, returning in time to be a delegate to the 
Constitutional Convention in 1787. He died at 
Philadelphia in 1790. 

II. Franklin as a Writer. — A Dissertatio7i on 
Liberty and Necessity was printed by Franklin in 
London in 1725, during a temporary residence in 
that city, being a reply to a work by William 
Wollaston on which the young printer was setting 
t}^e. In 1732 Franklin began, in Philadelphia, 
the publication of Poor Richard's Almanac, the 
issue of which was continued for twenty-five years. 
'' Richard Saunders, Philomath " was the professed 
author, and Benjamin Franklin was the printer. 
The principal part of the almanac was a collection 
of original saws and sayings, which were eagerly 
awaited by the people, and promptly passed into 
current circulation. The inculcation of practices 
of prudence and economy was always a leading 
idea in these maxims, and they had a prompt effect 
in increasing the amount of spare money in Phila- 
delphia. Besides these, the almanacs contained 



FRANKLIN AS A SCIENTIST. 15 

jocose introductions and doggerel rhymes for each 
month. The annual sale was about ten thousand 
copies, and they were fairly worn out by their 
homely readers. The most of Franklin's other 
writings consisted of miscellaneous and random, 
but by no means hasty papers on political, finan- 
cial, and scientific subjects. The Busybody^ a 
series of essays in would-be Addisonian style, and 
some ballads written in early life, should also be 
mentioned. Franklin was an excellent letter-writer, 
and in his correspondence a full picture of the 
man is presented. If anything further were needed 
to complete our idea of his personality, it is sup- 
plied in his Autobiography^ the only one of his 
writings possessing distinctly literary merit, and 
therefore doubly welcome in an age when theology 
and politics absorbed the attention of the colonial 
mind. 

12. Franklin as a Scientist and Diploma- 
tist. — To Franklin belongs the honor of showing 
that lightning is electricity ; and the invention of 
the lightning-rod. About the year 1750 he fore- 
shadowed this discovery in his letters, and was 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in conse- 
quence of his papers on the subject. In foreign 
courts his influence was largely due to personal 
power, but as a political writer he is clear and 
cogent. 

13. Other Writers of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury. — A trustworthy History of the First Discov- 



1 6 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

ery and Settlement of Virginia was published in 
1747 by William Stith, afterwards president of Wil- 
liam and Mary College. John Woolman, an itiner- 
ant Quaker, born in New Jersey, wrote little, his 
principal literary production being in the form of 
personal recollections. This J^our?ial of Life and 
T7'aveh iii the Service of the Gospel appeared in 
1774, three years after his death, and may be put 
on the shelf beside Franklin's Autobiography^ on 
the score of Charles Lamb's advice : " Get the 
writings of John Woolman by heart." Thomas 
Prince, minister of the Old South Church, Boston, 
from 1718 to 1758, planned a Chro7tological His- 
tory of New England, in the form of annals, from 
1603 to 1730, but only brought the work down to 
1633. It was his intention to present a bare chron- 
icle of facts, but in passages he rose to a certain 
modest eloquence of historic portrayal. Chief Jus- 
tice Samuel Sewall, of Boston, was a prominent 
man in the colony, and wrote several books ; better 
than all of them, however, was his full Diary from 
1674 to 1729, first published by the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, in 1878-1881. Sincere, graphic, 
and shrewd, these note-books of Judge Sewall's 
present an important picture of Puritan life in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and are the 
most remarkable contribution to American social 
history yet made by a diarist. 



HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY, 17 



HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 

Smith's A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents 
of Noate as hath hapned in Virginia^ etc. (accessible in Ar- 
ber's reprint of Smith's works), Bradford's history Of Pliinoth 
Plantation, Winthrop's History of A^ew England, Sewall's 
Diary, Jefferson's N'otes on Virginia, Lodge's Short History 
of the English Colonies in America, and Weeden's Economic 
and Social History of N'ew Engla7td, read consecutively, will 
give a sound elementary knowledge of the foundations of so- 
ciety in the colonies, out of which literature ultimately rose. 
Valuable for young or busy readers is Lowell's essay on New 
Englaiid Two Centuries Ago, in the first series of Among my 
Books. 

The Old South Leaflets (address Old South Meeting-House, 
Boston) reproduce a great number of important documents 
in English and American constitutional history, and are here 
mentioned because some of them are subsidiary to literature. 

Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature 
is the most extensive body of representative selections illus- 
trating the growth of authorship in America; the first volume, 
in particular, includes extracts from rare books available only 
in the largest libraries. 

Tyler's History of American Literature to 1765 is the fullest 
account of the struggles of the colonists toward book-making. 

Richardson's American Literature, 1 607-1885, is the most 
extended history of our literature to the present time. 



CHAPTER 11. 

1775-1812. 

1. The Revolutionary Period. — The Ameri- 
can Revolution was the cause of much commotion 
in literature as well as in the forum or the field, being 
preceded, attended, and followed by great activity 
of the pen. A large part of the books and pamphlets 
written at the time were necessarily of temporary 
interest and of the slightest value as literature. But 
several of the speeches delivered during or before 
the meeting of the Continental Congress are marked 
by the fire and intensity of an earnest period. 
James Otis, of Boston, born in 1725, was the author 
of some vigorous pamphlets, and was an inspiring 
orator. A few fragments of his speeches have been 
preserved, but the one which is most familiar to 
school-boys is an avowed modern imitation. Josiah 
Quincy Jr. (i 744-1 775) shared with Otis, in Mas- 
sachusetts, the oratorical honors of the time. John 
Adams wrote influential pamphlets, and the Virgin- 
ian Patrick Henry, like Otis, deserves some literary 
mention for the fervid eloquence of his harangues 
or set speeches. 

2. George Washington as a Writer. — Though 
Washington at no time in his life paid particular 



THOMAS JEFFERSON. 19 

attention to the rhetorical art, he possessed a clear 
and somewhat individual style. Without including 
many productions of special interest, his literary 
" remains " are sufficient to fill fourteen large vol- 
umes. The journal of his expedition to the Ohio 
River was published at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 
1754, and his Farewell Address in 1796, — a pro- 
duction reverently read by two generations of 
Americans. The rest of his collected works, pro- 
duced between these two dates, consist of addresses, 
messages, and correspondence. As a letter-writer 
Washington excelled, like Franklin ; and during 
his lifetime he was compelled to make out a list of 
spurious letters attributed to him, the popularity of 
his correspondence having led to such forgeries. 

3. Thomas Jefferson was one of the most 
broadly educated men of his time, leaving been for- 
tunate in his instructors and zealous in the prose- 
cution of his studies. Many branches of learning 
he had pursued beyond the usual limit, and he was 
a vigorous writer, though no orator. His Notes on 
Virginia were written for the information of the 
French government, and were published in 1784. 
They include many shrewd observations and inter- 
esting suggestions. Jefferson's somewhat volumi- 
nous correspondence may be considered his most 
graceful literary memorial, though the Declaration 
of Independence, which he wrote, will always be 
considered one of the most remarkable of public 
documents, aside from its political importance. 



20 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

4. The Federalist was a collection of essays 
published periodically, and arguing in favor of the 
Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1789. 
There were eighty-five numbers in all, of which the 
first seventy-six appeared in The Independent Jour- 
nal^ a semi-weekly newspaper published in New 
York. The publication began on October 27, 1787, 
and ceased, as far as the journal was concerned, on 
April 2, 1788. The Federalist was the concerted 
work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and 
John Jay, who adopted no separate signatures, but 
wrote over the common name of Publius. The 
letters were addressed to the people of New York, 
in order to induce that state to support the pro- 
posed national Constitution. The purpose of the 
publication was controversial, for the Constitution 
had been so sharply attacked that its friends per- 
ceived the necessity of rallying to its defence. The 
original idea was Hamilton's, and he drew up the 
plan of the series. The completed work does not 
form a systematic treatise, but covers many ques- 
tions of government which every student of political 
science must consider. The authors had a special 
end in view, and they were zealous to show the 
colonists that advantage and danger united in de- 
manding the adoption of a Federal Constitution, 
with its checks and balances of a responsible ex- 
ecutive, a legislature with a strong upper chamber 
and a popular lower chamber, and an independent 
judiciary. In the light of later experience the wis- 



THOMAS PAINE. 2i 

dom and forethought of the writers are apparent. 
The work has been repeatedly issued, and is recog- 
nized as a standard authority on the elementary 
principles of government. 

5. Thomas Paine was a prominent figure in 
Revolutionary literature, but must be remembered 
as a hard fighter rather than an intellectual force, 
in the higher sense of the term. Born in England 
in 1737, he began his working life as a stay-maker 
and dissenting preacher, meanwhile getting a gen- 
eral knowledge of literature by such promiscuous 
reading as he could do at odd moments. Becoming 
angry with the British government in consequence 
of his dismissal from the revenue service, he came 
to America in 1774 and obtained speedy notoriety 
as a political writer. His Serious Thoughts on Sla- 
very was a magazine article printed in 1775. Com- 
mon Sense, a political pamphlet, advocating a de- 
claration of independence and the formation of a 
republic, had a wide circulation, and exerted no 
small influence. At the end of 1776, Paine started 
a periodical called The Crisis, which was published, 
at no stated intervals, for some time, and had many 
readers. His patriotic services during the war were 
appreciated and rewarded, though his temper got 
him into occasional trouble. The Eights of Ma?i, 
an attempted vindication of the French Revolution, 
appeared in 1791 and 1792 ; and he wrote The Age 
of Reason in 1794 and 1795, partly in a French 
prison. The latter work has continued in circulation 



22 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN- LITERATURE. 

to the present day, chiefly among unscholarly read- 
ers. It advocates a pure deism, but its method 
of criticism and temper of attack are now generally 
repudiated by the more learned writers of the same 
school. 

6. Poets. — Philip Freneau, a Huguenot by de- 
scent and a New Yorker by birth, was the first 
American poet to attain much note, though there 
was a multitude of ballad-writers during the war. 
He published four volumes, and his political bur- 
lesques were very popular during the Revolution. 
His House of Night — a sort of reminiscence of 
Gray's Elegy and anticipation of Coleridge and the 
new-romantic poets of the nineteenth century — was 
the one American poem, in the strict sense of the 
word, written before 1800. John Trumbull's Pro- 
gress of D^dbiess and Elegy on the Times attracted no 
great attention ; but his AfcEingal (1782), a rollick- 
ing satirical poem in the style of Butler's Hudibras^ 
had a great circulation. Some of its lines are still 
popularly assigned to Butler. Francis Hopkinaon 
and Robert Treat Paine, Jr., were other patriotic 
and humorous versifiers. Joel Barlow's Visio?i of 
Cohiinbus (1787) was for a time a favorite; and his 
graver Cohcrnbiad^ an expansion of the preceding, 
issued in 1808, was the first attempt at a national 
epic. It is. stiff, but occasionally rises into merit. 
Barlow is better known by a poem on *^ hasty-pud- 
ding." Phillis Wheatley, a Massachusetts negress, 
had published a volume of not discreditable verse 



HISTORIANS AND OTHER WRITERS. 23 

in London in 1773. The greater part of the Amer- 
ican poetry of the time, even the most patriotic, 
was in humble imitation of English models, and 
possessed relative interest but no absolute value. 

7. The First Novelist. — Charles Brockden 
Brown's Wieland^ printed in 1798, introduced fic- 
tion into American literature. The slow appear- 
ance of the cis- Atlantic novel was not strange, for 
the conditions did not favor imaginative literature ; 
indeed, the English social novel did not appear be- 
fore the middle of the eighteenth century. Ormond 
was Brown's second book, and received prompt if 
uncritical approval. Arthur Mervym^ the third, 
was equally successful, and a better story than 
either. Brown had a graphic style, and no lack of 
imagination. Later writers have supplanted him, 
for the prevailing impression of gloom left by his 
books has not served to make them permanent 
favorites ; but at least he dared to introduce local 
scenes and characters, and developed his romantic 
and melancholy plots with a degree of originality the 
more creditable because his models were so few 
and untrustworthy. Brown, it should be added, 
started a monthly magazine, and was the first of 
our authors to make his whole living out of litera- 
ture. 

8. Historians and Other Writers. — The 
histories written during the last century are chiefly 
useful as authorities for later writers, and lack the 
significance of Bradford's chronicle, or Winthrop's. 



24 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

Dr. Abiel Holmes's (father of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes) Annals of America is of service as a sys- 
tematic compilation of leading events. In biogra- 
phy, William Wirt wrote a readable and once 
popular life of Patrick Henry ; and Chief Justice 
John Marshall prepared a solid biography of 
Washington. Scientific research was given a start 
by the writings of the ornithologist Alexander 
Wilson and other earnest specialists in new fields. 
Most of the writers of the time would not attract at- 
tention nowadays; and not all, even, of those here 
mentioned wrote as well as later authors whose 
names will be necessarily omitted in this book. 
Washington Irving once jocosely said of himself 
that he attracted attention because Englishmen were 
surprised to see an American with a quill in his hand 
and not on his head. But greater credit always 
belongs to the pioneer ; and it must be remem- 
bered that many authors of the eighteenth century 
wrote with meagre libraries ; with a narrow reading 
public, interested in theology and politics, not in 
literature ; with no possibility of making literature 
a livelihood ; and with far greater competition from 
foreign sources than that of which complaint is 
still made. 



HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY, 25 

HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 

Bancroft's History of the United States is the best and most 
extended record to 1789. 

Higginson's Larger History of the United States (to Jack- 
son's time) may be read by those desiring a one-volume story 
of considerable size. 

Eggleston's and Fiske's school histories of the United 
States are valuable as condensed records, emphasizing the 
life of the people. The student, in reading the four works 
just named, should carefully distinguish between mere intel- 
lectual activity and true literary creativeness. 

Parton's Life of Jefferson, though not profoundly analytic, 
is thoroughly readable, and a trustworthy picture of anti- 
Federalist life and character, especially in Virginia. 

Quincy's Life of Josiah Quincy is the best corresponding 
picture of Federalist life in New England. 

The American Statesmen and Ainerican Men of Letters 
Series should be placed entire upon the shelves of all but the 
smallest libraries. The former contains lives of Washington, 
Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, S. Adams, J. Adams, J. Q. 
Adams, Henry, Marshall, Jay, Webster, Calhoun, Monroe, 
Jackson, Randolph, Gallatin, Madison, Benton, Clay, Mor- 
ris, Van Buren, Cass, and Lincoln ; the latter, of P>anklin, 
Irving, Cooper, Bryant, N. Webster, Emerson, Thoreau, 
Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Poe, Willis, Simms, and Taylor. 

Fiske's Critical Period of American History ^ 1 783-1 789, is 
a useful book, the nature of which is explained by its title. 

Bryce's American Commonwealth is in other ways almost 
indispensable, but its treatment of American literature is 
weak and unsatisfactory. 

Prescott's paper on Charles Brockden Brown^ in Biog7'aph- 
ical and Critical Miscellanies^ is still helpful as a picture of the 
disadvantages attending the development of fiction in America. 

Winsor's Narrative a^id Critical History of America (see its 
index) contains several chapters bearing on the growth of 
early American authorship. 



CHAPTER HI. 

1812-1861. 

I. Theological Changes. — The increasing im- 
portance of political affairs, together with the 
growth in size and prosperity of the young nation, 
had served to deprive theology of its preeminent 
place in American literature, though only the rela- 
tive number of volumes on religious subjects was 
diminished. The beginning of the present century, 
however, was marked by a considerable contro- 
versial excitement among the New England clergy, 
incident to the spread of Unitarian views in and 
around Boston. Harvard University was the centre 
of interest, and the election of a Unitarian to the 
HoUis professorship of divinity in that institution, 
in 1805, excited great attention. The change in 
the Congregational churches of Massachusetts had 
been a gradual one, for many of the Congregational 
divines of Boston and its neighborhood had been 
regarded with suspicion by their stricter brethren, 
even during the eighteenth century. In 1785, the 
very year of the appearance of the first American 
Episcopal Prayer-Book, King's Chapel, in Boston, 
the pioneer Episcopal society in New England, 
had stricken out all Trinitarian expressions from 



THEOLOGICAL CHANGES. 27 

its liturgy; while as early as 1718 an Arian had 
been ordained over the Hingham church. The 
war of pamphlets and books began in 18 12, simul- 
taneously with the second conflict between England 
and the United States. The chief Unitarian leader 
was William Ellery Channing, while the most con- 
spicuous figure among the conservative Congrega- 
tionalists was, perhaps, Moses Stuart, professor in 
the theological seminary at Andover. The Pa7io- 
plist was established as the Trinitarian and The 
Christian Exaininer as the Unitarian organ ; and 
the discussion was carried on with ability on both 
sides, and with a suitable degree of courtesy, 
though it was impossible to debate matters in 
which the nature of God and the destiny of the 
soul were concerned without considerable earnest- 
ness of language. It is not desirable, in a brief 
study of the development of a national literature, 
to chronicle the names of those who have written 
for doctrinal or denominational purposes, without 
conscious or unconscious attainment of artistic re- 
sults in literary form ; but the general mitigation 
of the austerities of theology and of social life in 
the book-producing part of New England deserves 
record, because it gave poets, novelists, essayists, 
historians, and orators the constructive freedom 
essential to the production of true literature in any 
age. The Puritans ** builded better than they 
knew ; " and Avhen spiritual emancipation came, 
their intense individualism reappeared, far more 



28 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

potently than before, in an Emerson or a Haw- 
thorne. 

2. William Ellery Channing deserves mention 
as the most visible connecting link, in historical 
evolution, between the theological New England 
and the literary. He was born at Newport in 1780, 
graduated at Harvard when he was eighteen, and 
went to Virginia as a teacher ; but the return jour- 
ney, in 1800, so severely taxed his slight frame 
that he remained an invalid all his life. In 1803 
he became pastor of a Boston church, and soon 
was famous as a finished orator. His unstudied 
style was as felicitous as his thoughts were clear j 
and his Remarks o?i the Life and Character of Napo- 
leon Bo7iaparte^ published in 1828, justly gave him 
some European reputation. Many of his sermons 
were published ; and he continually delivered ad- 
dresses at ordinations and literary anniversaries, 
which occasions he used to make notable by the 
presentation of carefully prepared opinions on the 
leading religious and political questions of the time. 
He had returned from Virginia an uncompromis- 
ing opponent of slavery, and he argued against it 
to the day of his death. He hated controversy ; 
but his opinions were so firmly established and his 
method of expression so straightforward that his 
writings have a strong sweep. He had no need to 
remember the old maxim that art is to conceal art ; 
for he spoke and wrote in the simplest and most 
natural way, and was surprised to find himself 



OTHER RELIGIOUS WRITERS. 29 

deemed eloquent. His ideas of the sacredness of 
conscience were almost superstitious, and he 
thought the rights of the pleader ended with the 
solicitation toward obedience to the dictates of 
one's own sense of duty. His literary papers show 
what his reputation might have been had he con- 
fined himself to polite letters. His works fill six 
volumes, and are still found worthy of study, for 
they retain a considerable popularity in America 
and England, despite the temporary character of 
most of the subjects of the various lectures and 
essays. Channing died in 1842, at the age of sixty- 
two. 

3. Other Religious Writers. — Later authors 
whose religious work has impinged upon the lit- 
erary field have been President Mark Hopkins 
of Williams College, as in his terse and thought- 
ful Evidences of Christianity ; the Swedenborgian 
Henry James Sr., whose Substance and Shadow is 
a book of deep and broad thought ; James Free- 
man Clarke, whose Ten Great Religions showed 
that comparative religion could be made popularly 
interesting without loss of scholarship ; and Horace 
Bushnell, whose Moral Uses of Dark Things is a 
collection of true essays. Of all American preach- 
ers, those whose sermons have most vividly shown 
the personality of the man in a distinct literary 
style have been Theodore Parker, Henry Ward 
Beecher, and Phillips Brooks ; whose love for God 
and man fused their thoughts in the furnace of 



30 A PRIME R OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

genius. That they made no iasting mark upon our 
literature as such was due to their disposition not 
less than to their vocation. 

4. The Knickerbocker School. — " The Knick- 
erbocker writers '' is a loose and not very useful 
term applied to certain authors who began to write 
soon after the beginning of the century, who were 
for the most part residents of New York, and who 
were in some cases descendants of the old Dutch 
stock. After the Knickerbocker magazine was es- 
tablished some of them became its contributors, 
and this fact caused the name to cling longer than 
it otherwise would have done. For the sake of 
convenience, the members of the coterie may be 
considered in order, including under this head the 
names of Washington Irving, James Kirke Pauld- 
ing, Joseph Rodman Drake, and Fitz-Greene Hal- 
leck. 

5. Washington Irving was a native of New 
York city, born in 1783, and growing up in familiar- 
ity with its sights and characteristics. His father 
was of an old Scotch family, and his mother an 
Englishwoman. They were married before coming 
to this country. The boy^s older brothers had 
somewhat marked literary tastes, and under their 
guidance and example he soon began to read such 
of the English authors as his father's library con- 
tained. At nineteen he wrote for a newspaper 
edited by his brother Peter, taking up theatrical 
and social topics, and using the name of Jonathan 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 31 

Oldstyle. This pseudonym describes with suffi- 
cient accuracy the nature and tone of these youth- 
ful productions. In 1804, attacked by a slight 
malady of the lungs, Irving sailed for Bordeaux, 
whence, after various tours in the Mediterranean 
and Italy, he went to Paris for a few months' resi- 
dence. Taking Belgium and Holland on the way, 
he next settled for a time in London. Meeting 
Washington Allston, the painter, in Rome, he half 
made up his mind to abandon literature for art. 
He returned to New York in 1806, with a wide 
European experience and a great store of literary 
material. At home again, he at once set to work, 
and the next year started a fortnightly periodical 
after the style of the English essayists of the eigh- 
teenth century. Salmagundi was the title, and it 
professed to give the " whimwhams and opinions 
of Launcelot Langstaff, Esquire.'' Like Addison, 
Irving had the help of other literary friends in his 
enterprise, Paulding aiding him in the prose and 
his brother William furnishing the poetry. The 
social follies and fashions of the day were satirized 
in a vein of genial humor, and the work is therefore 
a good picture of bygone customs. There is a 
story running through the whole, and most of the 
'characters mentioned were real persons. Cockloft 
Hall, which figured prominently in the periodical, 
was a fine old house (still standing, though so mod- 
ernized as to be unrecognizable) on the bank of the 
Passaic River in Newark. In December, 1809, 



32 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

Knickerbocker's History of New York appeared. 
Washington Irving and Peter Irving began it as a 
parody on a popular handbook issued a short time 
before, and its historical style was a burlesque of 
the language of a sketch printed in that publication. 
When Peter Irving went to Europe, Washington 
determined to continue the historical burlesque, 
and to make it a longer and independent comic 
history. An air of verisimilitude was given it by 
the publication of some preliminary notices con- 
cerning the finding of the manuscript in the Co- 
lumbian Hotel in Mulberry Street; and not a few 
persons were dull enough to be deceived by its 
evident but delicate pleasantry. Some descendants 
of the Dutchmen took serious offense at the per- 
sonal caricatures in the book, but everybody read 
it, and it was not long before it became a sort of 
national classic. We had at last something all our 
own, which was not copied from London or bor- 
rowed from Paris ; and the impetus thus given 
to native production was considerable. In 1810 
Irving wrote a short biographical sketch of the 
poet Campbell, and three years later edited a mag- 
azine in Philadelphia, which for the next few years 
showed some signs of becoming the literary capital 
of the country. During another trip to Europe he 
began to publish the Skefch-Book, in numbers, and 
it was a success in both London and New York. 
Irving had won the warm friendship of Sir Walter 
Scott, who induced the London publisher Murray 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 33 

to accept his book and pay the round price of ;^2oo 
for it. Murray afterwards doubled this sum, and 
Irving soon found himself in receipt of revenues 
from his pen much greater than Charles Brockden 
Brown, his only American predecessor as a profes- 
sional author, ever enjoyed. The Sketch-Book con- 
tained the perennial Legend of Sleepy Hollow and 
J^ip Van Winkle; and readers perceived that a 
new master of prose style had arisen, as well as a 
delicate humorist and a man in sympathy with the 
human heart. In 1820 and 182 1 Irving w^as in 
Paris, and in the latter year Murray paid him the 
great price of ;^iooo ior Bracebridge Hall^ a picture 
of English country life. In 1824 ;£'i5oo was paid 
by the same publisher for the Tales of a Traveller^ 
which the public received with less favor than had 
been accorded its predecessor. Two years later 
Alexander H. Everett, then minister to Spain, gave 
Irving a commission to translate some recently col- 
lected documents concerning Columbus. This was 
the basis of Irving's Lfe and Voyages of Christo- 
pher Columbus^ published in London in 1828, and 
sold to its publisher for three thousand guineas. 
Irving was now as successful in both fame and money 
as the best English authors who wrote at that period 
of high literary remuneration. This biographical 
work was kindly received by the critics, and seems 
to have determined Irving to cultivate the Spanish 
field further. The Chrofiicles of the Conquest of 
Granada followed, the author having made another 



34 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE, 

tour in the south of Spain. It was a losing ven- 
ture, and attracted no general praise ; but Irving 
wrote still another Spanish book on the Voyages of 
the Companions of Columbus^ which appeared in 
1 83 1. The Alhamhra (1832) was a sort of Spanish 
edition of Bracehridge HalL After serving for a 
time as secretary of legation in London, Irving re- 
turned home in 1832, and determined to explore 
the wdlds of the West, in lieu of Castilian antiquity. 
His Tour on the Frairies (1835) ^^'^^ reissued, with 
some European sketches, in a volume entitled The 
Crayon Miscellany^ which took its name from the 
author's pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentle- 
man. Astoria^ the poorest and obscurest of the 
books to which Irving gave his name, w^as written 
to please John Jacob Astor ; it described Irving's 
youthful visit to the Montreal station of the North- 
w^est Fur Company, with accounts of early fur-trad- 
ing expeditions in Oregon. Miscellaneous contri- 
butions to the Knickerbocker xi\2Lg?iZVi\^ occupied the 
author until his appointment, in 1842, as minister 
to Spain. Coming back in 1846, he enlarged an 
agreeable biography of Oliver Goldsmith, in which 
he hit Dr. Johnson some hard raps ; and also 
began Mahomet and his Successors, published in 
1850. Irving's fame, at this time, was declining, 
and the quality of his work deteriorating ; but 
having subjected all his previous volumes to slight 
revisions, and brought out a new and uniform edi- 
tion, he found that his public was still large and 



JAMES KIRKE PAULDING. 35 

loyal. Undeterred by advancing age (he was now 
sixty-seven), he undertook his largest labor, the Life 
of WasJwigtoii^ the fifth and last volume of which 
was published three months before his death, in 
1859. This biography had an army of readers, and 
deserved them, for it embodied all the accessible 
facts concerning Washington's life, in the felicitous 
style of a great master of Addisonian English. The 
earlier books, however, are most prized by the pre- 
sent generation of readers, and the Sketch-Book^ on 
the whole, remains the best example of his powers, 
combining, as it does, humor, pathos, and felicity 
of description. Irving's chief faults are a senti- 
ment that sometimes degenerates into sentimental- 
ity, and a would-be graciousness of style that often 
seems artificial. 

6. James Kirke Paulding, now wholly a figure 
of the past, was five years older than Irving, having 
been born in 1778 in the town of Nine Partners, 
Dutchess County, New York. He survived Irving 
for a similarly brief period, dying in Hyde Park, 
New York, in i860. William Irving was his brother- 
in-law, and Paulding took up his abode in the house 
of that gentleman, in New York, in 1797. Having 
literary tastes of his own, he fell in with the plans 
of his every-day associates, and worked upon Sal- 
magu7idi with enthusiasm, when that short-lived 
periodical was started. Paulding was an office- 
holder a good part of his life, being secretary to the 
board of navy commissioners in 18 15, navy agent 



36 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE. 

at New York for a dozen years, and secretary of the 
navy during the administration of Van Buren. He 
began his career as a versifier ; brought out, single- 
handed, in 1819, a second series of Sahnagimdi; and 
during all his life was constantly writing poems, 
novels, humorous sketches, and pamphlets. The 
Dutchman's Fireside^ a novel published in 1831, is 
his best work. 

7. Joseph Rodman Drake wrote little, died 
young, and yet, by a few verses, has kept a perma- 
nent place in the American anthology. At the time 
of his death (1820) he was only twenty-five, having 
been a resident of New York all his life. Poverty 
was his lot at the first, but he contrived to study 
medicine, taking his degree in 18 16. Marrying a 
rich wife was his deliverance, and he was thus 
enabled to spend much of his time with Fenimore 
Cooper and Fitz-Greene Halleck, meanwhile ma- 
turing plans for literary labor. The Culprit Fay, 
his chief work, appeared in 18 19, having been 
written in consequence of a discussion between 
Drake, Cooper, and Halleck concerning the poetry 
of American rivers. In the samxC year he joined 
with Halleck in contributing verses to the newspa- 
pers under the name of *' Croaker," or ^* Croaker, Jr." 
The American Flag, a national lyric of much spirit but 
over-florid language, keeps Drake's name in the 
school reading-books. When he died, his friend 
Halleck laid this leaf of laurel on his grave : — 



OTHER EARLY POETS. 37 

" Green be the turf above thee, 
Friend of my better days ; 
None knew thee but to love thee, 
Nor named thee but to praise.'* 

8. Fitz-Greene Halleck was almost exactly a 
contemporary of Irving and Paulding, having been 
born at Guilford, Connecticut, in 1790, and dying 
there in 1867. He removed to New York in 181 1, 
and became clerk in a banking-house, but after- 
wards went into the office of John Jacob Astor. 
Halleck wrote little poems when a boy, some of 
which got printed in the newspapers. But when 
he formed his literary partnership with Drake, 
though twenty-eight years old, he had no conspic- 
uous reputation. He wrote little more than Drake, 
and his martial poem, Marco Bozzaris (first pub- 
lished in a volume in .1827), has remained his virtual 
title to fame, though he wrote a long poem called 
Fanny^ and lesser pieces entitled Alnwick Castle 
and Burns^ which have their admirers. It is only 
necessary to add that Halleck retired to Guilford 
in 1849 o^ ^ pension of two hundred dollars a year, 
given by the will of John Jacob Astor. He edited 
an excellent edition of Byron, as well as two vol- 
umes of selections from the British poets. 

9. Other Early Poets. — Richard Henry 
Dana was born in 1787, and in early life was as- 
sociated with the club of gentlemen, headed by 
William Tudor, which established The North 
America7i Review in 18 15. Like his New York 



38 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

contemporaries just mentioned, he published an 
essay-serial called The Idle Man, on which Bryant 
and Washington Allston gave him some help. The 
Buccaneer, with other carefully written poems, 
appeared in 1827 ; this piece remains his best 
achievement. His prose essays are graceful, in 
an old-fashioned v/ay. Charles Sprague, a Bos- 
tonian who never went ten miles from his home, is 
another writer who deserves mention for the quality 
rather than the quantity of his verse. His Ode on 
Shakespeare, like Dana's poems, showed that the 
Boston bards, even if lacking the fire of imagination, 
were sedulously cultivating the art of verse-making. 
Richard Henry Wilde, a native of Dublin and a 
member of Congress from Georgia, wrote a famous 
lyric beginning My Life is like a Summer Rose. 
Other poets of the time, made celebrated by single 
pieces, were Francis Scott Key, whose Star 
Spangled Ba7iner was written during the siege of 
Fort AIcHenry, Baltimore, in the war of 18 12; 
Samuel Woodworth, who wrote The Old Oake?t 
Bucket ; John Howard Payne, whose Ho77ie, Sweet 
Home was first made public in a play ; and Albert 
G. Greene, the author of Old Grimes is Dead. 
J. G. C. Brainard, author of a grandiose poem on 
Niagara, and James A. Hillhouse were the suc- 
cessors of Dwight and Trumbull in Connecticut. 
Hillhouse was the author of somewhat heavy poems 
and dramas on religious subjects, Hadad commg 
under the latter head, and being his best-known 
production. 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 39 

10. William Cullen Bryant connected the ear- 
lier and later days of our literature ; for he continued 
his activity as an author to the end of his life, in 
1878. He was born in Cummington, Massachu- 
setts, in 1794, his father being the village physician 
and a man of good mental powers. Of all examples 
of literary precocity Bryant is one of the most 
remarkable. At the age of ten he was writing 
verse for the country papers, and at fourteen he 
brought out a couple of political poems. The Em- 
bargo and The Spanish Revolution, They were 
received with such favor that it was difficult to 
persuade the public that they were the work of a 
boy of fourteen. A second edition appeared in 
1809, with certifications to that effect. In 18 10 
Bryant entered Williams College, but did not grad- 
uate. Taking the law for his profession, he printed 
in 18 17 his celebrated poem of Thanatopsis^ choos- 
ing as the vehicle The North American Review^ 
which was begun as a general literary magazine. 
The poem has since been considerably changed ; 
but even in its earliest form it plainly showed the 
arrival of an American poet greater than any who 
had preceded him. Though the poem has death 
for its subject, it contains, like the Psalms of 
David, no absolute expression concerning the con- 
scious immortality of the soul ; yet it has been 
universally accepted by Christians as an embodi- 
ment of serenely courageous views of life and 
death ; omitting, perhaps_, but not denying. In 182 1 



40 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

Bryant read a long poem on The Ages before the 
Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, and the same 
year collected a few of his poems in a volume pub- 
lished at Cambridge. In 1825 he removed to New 
York, and became editor of the United States 
Review^ for which he wrote largely. The next year 
he became editorially connected with the Evening 
Post^ then a strong Federalist paper, but changed 
by Bryant into an organ of Democracy and free 
trade. A little bound volume, called The Talisman^ 
appeared annually for three years, beginning in 
1827, Robert C. Sands and Gulian C. Verplanck 
doing some of the writing, and Bryant the rest. It 
differed from The Idle Ma?i and Salmagundi in its 
wider scope and less frequent issue. At this time 
Bryant occasionally wrote short stories. In 1832 
he brought out a new edition of his poems, which, 
thanks to the influence of Irving, was reissued in 
London. Christopher North praised it in Black- 
wood, and the poet's position became secure, both 
abroad and at home. Between 1834 and 1849 
Bryant was thrice in Europe, and wrote of his 
journeyings in an unimportant prose work called 
Letters of a Traveller, A second series of these 
letters followed another journey in 1858. By 1864 
Mr. Bryant, though a slow and painstaking writer, 
had accumulated enough additional poems to make 
a thin volume. Of all his pieces, besides Thana- 
topsis, those entitled To a Waterfowl, A Forest 
Hymn, The Planting of the Apple-Tree, and The 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 41 

Flood of Year's are the best. Bryant is the poet of 
nature, whose austerer moods are accurately de- 
picted in his cold verse. After passing his seven- 
tieth birthday, he determined to translate the Iliad 
of Homer, and published in 1869 a version in 
unrhymed pentameter, which, notwithstanding the 
constant agitation of the question of Homeric trans- 
lation, has been generally accepted as a good Eng- 
lish Homer. A similar translation of the Odyssey 
appeared in 187 1. Homer's chief qualities are 
stateliness and sweep, of which Bryant reproduces 
the first ; the magnificent motion of the Greek 
hexameter the English pentameter cannot ade- 
quately represent. 

II. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the 
third in age of the chief American poets, — Bryant 
and Emerson having been his seniors. He was 
born in 1807 in Portland, Maine, of a courtly and 
well-to-do family. When fourteen years old, he 
entered Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 
1825 in the class with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom 
at that time he knew pleasantly but not intimately. 
Like Bryant, Longfellow at first determined to be a 
lawyer, but the year after graduation, though but 
nineteen, he was offered the professorship of mod- 
ern languages at Bowdoin, to qualify himself for 
which position he spent three years of study in 
Europe. From 1829, after his return, until 1835, 
he occupied the chair, writing short poems, and 
printing prose articles in The North American 



42 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

Review. His first book was a little essay on the 
moral and devotional poetry of Spain, including 
translations of the Coplas de Manrique and some 
of Lope de Vega's sonnets. In 1835 he was chosen 
to succeed George Ticknor, who had just resigned 
the chair of modern languages at Harvard. This 
professorship he continued to hold until 1854, when 
he resigned and was succeeded by James Russell 
Lowell. With occasional trips to Europe, he con- 
tinued to reside in Cambridge until his death in 
1882, occupying the stately old house used by 
Washington for his headquarters in 1775. 

12. Longfellow's Poems. — Voices of the Nighty 
his first original volume, appeared in 1839, and in- 
cluded the best of the author's poems written up to 
that date ; among them some produced in his un- 
dergraduate days at Bowdoin. He was luckier than 
Tennyson in the reception given to his first venture, 
for A Psahn of Life, The Reaper a7id the Flowers, 
and Woods in Winter w^ere among the pieces in- 
cluded, and almost at once became popular favor- 
ites. Ballads a?id Other Poems — among them The 
Skeleton iii Armor, The Rainy Day, and The Vil- 
lage Blacksmith — appeared in 1842 \ and also a 
slender collection of Poems on Slavery, generally 
considered the least meritorious of the poet's works. 
The Spanish Student (1843), a pleasant little 
drama, introduced an element of humor which Mr. 
Longfellow, with a single exception, did not after- 
wards attempt to cultivate. The Belfry of Bruges, 



LONGFELLOW'S POEMS. 43 

mainly original poems, with a few translations, 
came in 1846. The next year, 1847, Mr. Long- 
fellow began the publication of several poems which 
had a powerful effect in stimulating the growth of 
a literature devoted to American subjects. Evan- 
geline^ a sweet idyl of exile and love, was the first, 
written in hexameters, a metre previously little 
used. In its employment Mr. Longfellow has had 
plenty of followers, but few have succeeded in its 
use. The Seaside and the Fireside (minor poems) 
and The Golden Legend came between Evangeline 
and Hiaivatha (1855), another American poem, 
this time on an Indian subject, and written in a 
second unfamiliar metre, trochaic octosyllables. 
In it were embodied many Indian legends industri- 
ously collected by the author, and put into a form 
that proved attractive to multitudes of Americans 
and w^holly novel to the English public, which had 
already given to Longfellow greater favor than it 
had ever shown to Tennyson. Hiawatha may 
fairly be called the nearest approach to an Amer- 
ican epic. The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) 
was a semi-humorous poem of colonial days, also 
in hexameters. In Tales of a Wayside Liii (1863) 
the expedient was adopted of embodying, as tales 
told at a chance gathering in an old inn at Sud- 
bury, several long poems on various subjects. Two 
additional series have since appeared. Mr. Long- 
fellow's distinctively American poems closed with 
The New England Tragedies (1868), two stern colo- 



44 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

nial dramas; and in 1872, having published The 
Divine Tragedy^ a dramatic account of the cruci- 
fixion of Christ, the author united the two last- 
mentioned works and The Golden Legend in a single 
volume entitled Ch7'istus, They make a fairly 
symmetrical whole ; but, though the plan had been 
long in the author's mind, it may be doubted 
whether a tale of mediaeval love-loyalty and two 
Puritan tragedies form the best illustrations of the 
progress of Christianity through the centuries. 
The Hanging of the O^a^te, a brief domestic poem, 
made an illustrated volume in 1874; and the next 
year the poet read at the fiftieth anniversary of his 
graduation at Bowdoin a remarkable poem, Mo- 
rituri Salutamns^ which, unlike most occasional 
pieces, was made noble by the author's intense per- 
sonal feeling in the event. Flower de Luce^ After- 
math, The Masque of Pandora, Kerainos, and 
Ultima Thule were later books ; In the Harbor 
and Michael Angelo were posthumously published. 
Throughout all Longfellow's poetry the prevailing 
marks are grace and beauty, warmed by a greater 
human sympathy than is displayed in the writings 
of the majority of eminent poets. 

13. Longfellow's Other Works. — The prose 
writings of Mr. Longfellow have passed into the 
shadow, and have few readers to-day. But they 
played no small part in the development of culture 
in the new nation during the first half of the nine- 
teenth century, — a development greatly promoted 



JOHN GREENLEAF V/HITTIER, 45 

by the miscellaneous and in its nature temporary 
portion of the work of the author of Hiawatha, In 
his youth he added to the drudgery of teaching 
the preparation of elementary text-books in French, 
Spanish, and Italian ; the sketches of travel called 
Outre-Mer (1835) ^^^ "^^ pensive and poetical ro- 
mance Hyperion (1839) brought to American readers 
the quaint charm of past and present Europe ; an 
essay on Anglo-Saxon literature gave a considerable 
impulse to the study of Old English, then almost an 
unknown tongue ; an anthology of The Poets and 
Poetry of Europe is still conveniently serviceable; 
a voluminous collection of Poefns of Places^ edited 
by Mr. Longfellow in later life, showed his con- 
tinued willingness to give the public of readers the 
benefit of his wide learning and his editorial taste ; 
while in 1867 appeared his translation of the P>ivine 
Comedy of Dante, of which he had long been a 
careful student. It closely follows the metre of the 
original, line by line, the spirit as well as the form 
being preserved ; and Mr. Longfellow, besides giv- 
ing a version of Dante superior to its predecessors, 
influenced, by his work, other American literal 
translators. This fidelity to the original text was 
gained, however, at the expense of tripping ease of 
language, and the translation must be considered 
rather hard reading, a circumstance partly due to 
the frequent presence of the feminine ending of 
the verse. 

14. John Greenleaf Whittier, although always 



46 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

an industrious and conscientious author, never at- 
tained high popularity until the latter part of his life, 
when, by common consent in America, — though his 
European renown has always been small, — he was 
ranked among the first of our poets. A poor boy, 
of Quaker parentage, he began life as a farmhand 
and shoemaker, going to the village school in the 
winter months. His first poetical efforts, written 
when he was but seventeen, were published in 
the Newburyport Free Press, edited by William 
Lloyd Garrison ; and he subsequently contributed 
verses to the Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette, 
published near his birthplace. He afterwards con- 
trived to spend two years at the academy in that 
town. In 1829 he began journalistic work in Bos- 
ton, where, as well as in Hartford, Haverhill, 
Philadelphia, and Washington, he edited newspapers 
until 1839 ; and in 1847 he became corresponding 
editor of Dr. Gamaliel Bailey's National Era in 
Washington, to which he contributed many poems, 
reformatory and other. He early identified himself 
with the movement for the abolition of slavery, aiding 
in the establishment of the American Antislavery 
Society at Philadelphia ; and of this act he once said 
that, though not insensible to literary reputation, 
he set a higher value on his "name as appended to 
the Antislavery Declaration of 1833 than on the 
title-page of any book.'' Throughout the long 
antislavery agitation his poems were chiefly di- 
rected to the awakening of the people to the 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 47 

horrors of slavery and the wickedness of any com- 
promise or compHcity with those who were engaged 
in the dreadful traffic. His Voices of Freedom (1841) 
and The Fanoratna and Other Foems (1856) contain 
many poems which are full of fire and inspiration, 
and glow with moral indignation and scorn. They 
were spirit-stirring as a trumpet-blast, and a power- 
ful help towards the dow^nfall of slavery. His 
poems In War-Time (1863) gave him a popularity 
which his adherence to a hitherto despised cause 
had rendered impossible. With the close of the 
war he gladly turned his pen to gentler themes, 
publishing successively Snow-Bou7id (1865), The 
Tent on the Beach (1867), Among the Hills (1868), 
Miriam (1870), The Fennsylvania Filgrim (1872), 
Hazel-Blossoms (1874), The Vision of Echard (1878), 
and four other collections between 188 1 and 1892. 
Maud Midler is the best known of his shorter 
poems, and Barba^^a Frietchie (1862) the most re- 
markable of those connected wdth the civil war. 
Snow-Bound^ his best book, is a genuine New Eng- 
land idyl, and puts between its covers more of the 
spirit of the region than any other American poem. 
It seems likely to remain a national classic. Mr. 
Whittier brought together the chief of his fugitive 
prose wTitings in two volumes, and also edited the 
best edition of John Woolman's J^ournaL As a 
writer of prose he possesses clearness and vigor. 
His biographical sketches are in some cases beauti- 
ful as the tribute of friend to friend. His gentle 
and high-minded earthly career ended in 1892. 



48 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN IITERATURE, 

15. Holmes's Poems. — Oliver Wendell Holmes 
was born in a historic house in Cambridge, just 
opposite the Harvard University buildings, in 1809, 
and grew up in that town before it had outgrown 
its quainter local characteristics. At twenty he 
graduated at Harvard, in a class whose virtues and 
whose ornaments he never ceased to celebrate in 
anniversary poems. Like Bryant, Longfellow, and 
Lowell, he thought to be a lawyer, but soon took 
up medicine, which he studied in Europe, paying 
special attention to anatomy, the branch he long 
taught at Harvard. The Collegian^ a college period- 
ical, received many contributions from him, and in 
1836, the year he took his medical degree, he 
brought out a collected edition of his poems, in- 
cluding a rhymed essay on Poetry^ read by him at 
Cambridge that year. From that time he was 
always a favorite American poet at literary anniver- 
saries. His lyrical facility was unsurpassed by 
that of any other of our writers. That he was a 
humorist detracted from, rather than added to, his 
reputation, for there is a popular idea that a humor- 
ist cannot have deep feeling. In Holmes's case 
this is not true ; for The Last Leaf, perhaps his 
best single poem, is a masterpiece of pathos. Old 
Lronsides is a standard national lyric, and Holmes 
wrote a good share of the few commendable poems 
evoked by the civil war. Some of his best pieces 
— like The Deacon's Masterpiece^ Tarso?i Tiirell's 
Legacy, and The Chambered Nautilus — first ap- 



HOLMES'S PROSE WORKS. 49 

peared in his longer prose works, where they fitted 
into their surroundings with entire appropriateness. 
He wTote no long poem. 

16. Holmes's Prose Works. — Dr. Holmes was 
a leading spirit in the establishment of The Atlantic 
Mofithly, and its prompt success w^as largely due to 
his Autocrat of the Breakfast -Tahle^ a series of 
articles, half story, half essay, which were a novelty 
in American literature. Their satire is severe and 
yet genial, and their wit as polished and supple as 
a Damascus blade. The Prof essor at the Breakfast- 
Table^ written in the same style, soon followed ; and 
in 1872 the author once more tried the dangerous 
experiment, in The Poet at the Breakfast-Table^ of 
endeavoring to repeat a former triumph, in which 
attempt he was not unsuccessful. Elsie Ven7ier^ a 
curious story whose burden was inherited tenden- 
cies, appeared in i860; and The Guardiaii Angel ^ 
the author's best novel, in 1867. The hero of the 
latter work is a scholarly old bachelor who has 
written an unsuccessful book, but who goes through 
the w^orld like a moving patch of sunshine. Dr. 
Holmes wrote a life of the historian Motley, wdiich 
is one of the few^ gems in American biographical 
literature, and a brisk, readable, and just life of 
Emerson ; while in his last years (his death occurred 
in 1894) he prepared a revised edition of all his 
books. His secure place among our authors is 
that of the lyrist of occasion, the poet of sincere 
pathos, and the essayist of reflection and humor. 



50 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

Of his work much, in the nature of things, must 
fade, for he wrote, in his own words, Rhyines of an 
Hour ; but the residuum will be a worthy one. 

17. James Russell Lowell, Uke Hohnes, wrote 
both poetry and prose, but it will not be necessary 
to consider them in separate sections. He, too, 
was born in Cambridge, in 18 19, in a spacious old 
house which remained his home. His father was 
the minister of the West Congregational Church 
in Boston. Lowell graduated at Harvard in 1838, 
being class poet, and reciting a poem which was 
deemed memorable in the student literature of the 
time. A law office in Boston was opened in 1840, 
but the poet soon shut its doors and devoted him- 
self entirely to literature. A Year's Life{\'^^\) in- 
cluded his poems up to that date, some of which the 
author afterward revised, throwing away the rest. 
Two years later he began the publication, in Boston, 
of The Pioneer^ a periodical of so high a character 
that it would surely fail now, and of course promptly 
came to its death at that time, though Lowell, Haw- 
thorne, Poe, Whittier, and Elizabeth Barrett wrote 
for it. In 1844 Lowell gathered poems enough to 
make another volume ; among them were A Legend 
of Brittany and Rhxcus, Some of the sonnets ex- 
pressed strong antislavery sentiments, and were 
addressed to the abolitionists Wendell Phillips and 
Joshua R. Giddings. The remainder of the vol- 
ume consisted of pieces which indicated that a new 
and true poet had arisen/notwithstanding certain 



JAMES RUSSELL LOW ELL. 51 

marks of juvenility, waywardness, or imitativeness. 
The subjects were not novel, but they were treated 
in a style of which opulence of thought was the 
chief characteristic. A prose series of Conversa- 
tions on the Old Foets (1845) critically considered 
Chaucer, George Chapman, and some obscurer 
writers. Another volume of poems was printed 
in 1848, of which The Present Crisis made a con- 
siderable sensation. The Vision of Sir Laimfal, 
published the same year, is the most elaborate of 
the author's productions, being an allegory of good 
deeds, and containing many quotable lines. At 
this time Mr. Lowell was very industrious, for in 
1848 he also brought out A Fable for Critics^ a 
clever characterization, in fluent verse, of the leading 
authors of the day, himself included. This char- 
acterization, though made in a humorous style, 
was accurate and just, and in the case of the younger 
writers its predictions have been amply verified. 
At the same fertile time in the author's life appeared 
the first series of the Biglow Fapcrs^ a collection of 
poems in Yankee dialect, by " Hosea Biglow," ed- 
ited and furnished with pseudo-learned notes and 
introductions by *^ Homer Wilbur, A. M., pastor of 
the First Church in Jaalam." These poems served 
a double purpose : that of preserving the perishable 
local expressions of New England in a permanent 
form ; and of fighting, with the sharpest weapons of 
satire, against the extension of slavery. This work, 
together with the Fable for Critics^ for the first time 



52 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

made Lowell a popular author, and gave him some 
reputation in England, though English readers at a 
much later date discovered that he was more than 
a humorist. In 1855 Lowell succeeded Longfellow 
in the chair of polite letters at Harvard, taking a 
European trip before entering upon his new duties. 
In 1867 a second series of the Biglow Papers in- 
cluded those poems in dialect which had been 
called out by the war. They were preceded by a 
critical essay in which was shown the antiquity of 
many presumed Yankee peculiarities of expression. 
It was not until 1869 that sufficient minor poems 
were collected to make another volume, which took 
its title of Under the Willows from its leading 
poem. The Com77ie7noratio7i Ode, in honor of the 
Harvard men who were killed in the war, was re- 
cited at Cambridge in 1865, and is the author's 
noblest poem and the most considerable poetic 
memorial of the struggle. For considerable periods 
Mr. lowell was editor of The Atlantic Monthly 
and The North Ajnerican Revie7v ; and his critical 
and miscellaneous essays in those periodicals were 
collected into volumes entitled Ainong 7?iy Books 
(two series) and My Study Wi7ido7as. These books, 
which showed their author to be the leading Amer- 
ican critic, agreeably united wit and wisdom, and 
were the result of extensive reading, illuminated by 
excellent critical insight. Having served his coun- 
try as minister to Spain in 1877-80, and to England 
in 1880-85, Lowell died in 189 1, and the literary 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 53 

and civic honors of two countries were laid upon 
his grave, as upon that — at the time of his death — 
of our most representative man-of-letters. His 
later books need not be catalogued here ; the one 
most maturely and broadly representative of his 
powers is the collection entitled Democracy and 
Other Addresses (1886). The chief characteristic 
of Lowell's style as poet and critic may be summed 
up in Theodore Watts' single word of apt charac- 
terization, sagacity, — a word which, if not neces- 
sarily synonymous with high creative genius, is 
indicative of applied intellectual strength. 

18. Edgar Allan J*oe, of all American authors, 
is the one whose repute is most distinctly indi- 
vidual. Deemed by not a few French, German, 
and English critics to be the only original man-of- 
genius among all our bards, his home public has 
been in large part composed of the young and the 
moodily impressionable, to whom his melodiously 
melancholy verse and his characteristically dra- 
matic prose have appealed with peculiar force. In 
his life he too often weakly yielded to intemperance 
and to selfish ingratitude ; but as an artist he applied 
to poetry and prose unwonted and unquestionably 
significant methods of thought and expression. 
The Raven, The Bells, To Helen (the shorter poem 
bearing that title), To One in Paradise, Annabel Lee, 
Ulalu?ne, and Dream-Land carry their intellectual 
and lyrical power to every new generation of read- 
ers j for Poe, standing as a sort of unconscious fol- 



54 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE, 

lower of Coleridge and Shelley, v/as a master in 
that assonance and alliteration, that creative con- 
trol over new and old verse-effects in English, 
afterwards differently and more broadly, but not 
more truly, displayed in the work of Swinburne. 
Of his prose tales, the best are The Fall of the 
Hoicse of Usher, Ligeia^ The Pit and the Pendulum^ 
The Gold Bug, The Purloined Letter, and The 
Afystery of Marie Roget, — his chief themes here as 
elsewhere being the strenuous self-assertion of the 
individual will in the presence of the mystery of 
death, and the clever unravelling of intricate prob- 
lems of ratiocination. Destitute (save in a few poems, 
or in the allegory of William JVilso?i) of Hawthorne's 
power of spiritual insight, and lacking Emerson's 
helpful philosophy of idealism, optimism, and manly 
courage, as a literary artist Poe was painstakingly 
conscientious, and absolutely loyal to his idea of 
the beautiful ; while as a minute realist, and the 
creator of unfamiliar types and hitherto unknow^n 
plots, he made and retains a place in prose fiction 
which can never be lost. His criticisms, though 
necessarily ephemeral, made just havoc of the re- 
nown of divers contemporary mediocrities in the 
American literary field, or set up canons of the 
poetic art which are interesting for the light they 
throw on his own genius and its expression. His 
one long story, The Adventures of Ai'thur Gordon 
Pym, is relatively clumsy in construction and in- 
effective in detail ; while his would-be mag?ium 



OTHER POETS. 55 

Opus, entitled Eureka : an Essay on the Material 
and Spiritual Universe, is unimportant and almost 
unreadable. 

19. Other Poets. — American literature, like 
the literature of England in the nineteenth century, 
has been increased, rather than highly enriched, by 
the songs of many who, while failing to reach the 
first or second rank, have sometimes deserved the 
name of poet. James Gates Percival, a melancholy 
and shy scholar, wrote A Dreain of a Day, Seneca 
Lake, and other pieces which once found popular- 
ity for their sentiment and smooth versification. 
N. P. Willis, whose reputation once overshadowed 
Longfellow's, wrote scriptural pieces of orotund 
obviousness of meaning, and two or three lyrics not 
yet forgotten ; but the modern reader scarcely 
deems him a poet at all. His kindly service to 
younger singers remains, however, a pleasant epi- 
sode in our literary history. George H. Boker, of 
Philadelphia, zealously tried to better the condition 
of the meagre field of American dramatic literature ; 
and some of his plays have strength and fire. The 
Divine Co7?iedy of Dante was partially translated 
by Dr. Thomas W. Parsons, of Boston, at the ex- 
pense of his original verse, which was of excellent 
quality. Notwithstanding the multiplicity of reli- 
gious denominations in this country, few good hymns 
have been written during the present century. As 
far as literature goes, our humor has been better 
than our piety. The greatest development of 



56 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

American humor, in prose and verse, has been of 
late years, but before the war John G. Saxe had 
become noted for clever travesties, puns, and love 
poems. As a poet of pure merriment he is at his 
best. Not until recently have we had, among our 
women, any commendable poets ; those writing 
before the war, save tlie Gary sisters, having been 
almost without exception slaves, led by Mrs. Sigour- 
ney, of the sentimentality which Mrs. Hemans and 
L. E. L. had made fashionable in England. 

20. Orators. — During the first fifty or sixty 
years of the present century, American oratory 
worthily advanced upon its vigorous beginnings in 
ante-Revolutionary times. To literature belong, 
unquestionably, the best of the speeches of the 
sonorous Webster, the philosophical Galhoun, the 
rhetorical Everett, the florid Ghoate, the classical 
Sumner, the dignified Winthrop, and the fervid 
Phillips. Of all these Webster was the greatest : 
the one American name to contest with Burke's 
the primacy in the field of English oratory. In his 
progressive array of marshalled arguments leading 
toward a seemingly axiomatic conclusion ; in his 
felicitous choice of word or allusion ; in his majestic 
and continuous statement of the dignity and endur- 
ance of constitutional union ; and (as in his speech 
in the White murder case at Salem) in his power of 
purely literary portrayal, — Webster is the orator of 
the nineteenth century. The student should first 
read, in addition to the speeches already noted, that 



GEORGE BANCROFT. 57 

on the character of the settlers of New Enghmd 
(Plymouth, December 22, 1820) ; the first Bunker- 
Hill address (1825) ; the reply to Hayne (1830) ; 
and the famous *' Seventh-of-March " (1850) com- 
promise speech on 21ie Constitution and the Union, 

21. Historians. — At first thought, the number 
of notable American historians — only four : Ban- 
croft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman — seems 
small ; but a comparison with other nations shows 
that during the present century we have had more 
than our share of historical writers of the first rank. 
Where libraries have not been accessible, our in- 
dustrious investigators have created them ; and 
their zeal and accuracy have made foreign coun- 
tries their debtors. 

22. George Bancroft, the author of the chief 
history of the United States, was born in Massa- 
chusetts and graduated at Harvard. His studies 
were completed at Gottingen, then beginning to be 
the fashionable German university for American 
students ; and on his return he published a not dis- 
creditable volume of poems showing the influence 
of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and a translation of a 
work on ancient Greece. An attempt to found an 
American Eton at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 
which Bancroft took part, was soon abandoned. 
The first volume of his History of the U7iited States^ 
the standard work on the subject, both for its mat- 
ter and manner, appeared in 1834. After that 
time he labored upon it diligently and 'pretty con- 



58 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

stantly, though the twelfth volume did not appear 
until 1882, the author having meanwhile been sec- 
retary of the navy and minister to England and 
Prussia. The style of the work is for the most 
part solid rather than brilliant, and the author ex- 
cels in those passages which set forth the charac- 
teristics of peoples or periods. His frank comments 
on some of the leaders of the Revolutionary move- 
ment brought down upon his head a shower of 
pamphlets written by descendants or partisans of 
the officers criticised. The work begins with Co- 
lumbus and ends with the beginning of the consti- 
tutional period in 1789. A revised edition appeared 
between 1883 and 1885. 

23. William Hickling Prescott, the most rhe- 
torically brilliant of American historians, — though 
his fame is at present somewhat overshadowed by 
Parkman's, — was a descendant of William Pres- 
cott, who fought at Bunker Hill. While in college, 
in 18 1 2, his left eye was so injured that during the 
rest of his life Prescott was partially blind, and had 
to employ an amanuensis, or a mechanical contriv- 
ance for writing. Luckily, his means v/ere ample, 
and he was able to pursue his studies, in the midst 
of a rather remarkable literary coterie, until he was 
thirty years old, when he determined to write his 
History of Ferdijiand and Isabella. The composi- 
tion of the work occupied him eleven years, and 
the author expended indefatigable care in the accu- 
mulation of material. It was immediately trans- 



JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. 59 

lated into five European languages, and became the 
most celebrated work of history that had thus far 
been written on this side of the Atlantic. Pres- 
cott's Conquest of Mexico (1843), Conquest of Peru 
(1847), ^"^ Philip the Second (1855-1858) were 
hardly less successful. He also edited Robertson's 
Cha7'Ies K, and collected from the reviews a vol- 
ume of Miscellanies, Three more volumes of Philip 
the Second were planned. Prescott died in Boston 
in 1859, and his life was faithfully written by his 
friend George Ticknor. Not since Milton, perhaps, 
had so high a reputation been won by a man prac- 
tically blind ; and few historians in the language 
have excelled Prescott in picturesque delineation 
of bygone scenes and empires. 

24. John Lothrop Motley was born in 18 14, 
studied at Harvard and Gottingen, wrote two slight 
novels, and in 1856 published The Rise of the 
Dutch Republic^ which has attracted readers and 
translators only fewer than Prescott's. His style is 
pellucid, while as a political analyst he is unex- 
celled. The History of the United Netherla7ids was 
published between 1861 and 1868, and the Life of 
John of Barneveld in 1874. Motley, like Irving, Ban- 
croft, Lowell, Marsh, Boker, and Howells, repre- 
sented the United States abroad. He died in 
1877. His great history of the Netherlands, as 
comprised in the three works named above, is vir- 
tually a history of civilized Europe during the im- 
portant period covered by the last part of the six- 



6o A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

teenth century and the first part of the seventeenth ; 
and its grand theme is the rise of modern consti- 
tutional liberty as over against Spain's last angry 
assertion of the might of politico-religious despot- 
ism. Between the contending factions Motley fol- 
lows the even path of historic justice ; and though 
William the Silent is his hero, he does not conceal 
the faults of that master-mind, or of his fellow 
Protestants, whether Lutheran or Calvinist. 

25. Francis Parkman, like Motley and Prescott, 
took a period for his subject, and proceeded to 
consider it in a series of slowly written historical 
monographs, finally grouped in a symmetrical 
whole. France and England in North America is 
the general theme ; and the struggle of the two 
nations for supremacy in the Western world is 
chronologically portrayed under the respective 
titles : The Pioneers of Fra?ice in the New Worlds 
The yesuits ifi North A7ne7Hca in the Seventeenth Cen- 
tury^ La Salle and the Discovery of the Great IVest, 
The Old Regi77ie in Canada^ Count Frontenac and 
New France nnder Louis XIV.^ A TIalf Centjiry of 
CoTiflict, and Montcalm and Wolfe. Of these, the 
volume on La Salle is perhaps the most original 
contribution to knowledge, and tells the story of 
the most significant single figure presented in the 
long record ; the account of the old Canadian re- 
gime is the most unified and picturesque ; while the 
story of Montcalm and Wolfe is the one most 
broadly constructed, on the larger lines of the phi- 



OTHER HISTORIANS. 6i 

losophic historian and the lover of liberty. Park- 
man also wrote a valuable history of The Conspiracy 
of Pontiac. His life, until its close in 1893, was a 
brave battle with insomnia and imperfect vision. 
The large achievements of our four historians seem 
all the more creditable if we remember the patient 
toils of Prescott and Parkman when well-nigh inca- 
pacitated for the duties of authorship, and the 
political or diplomatic services rendered by Ban- 
croft and Motley, — in Motley's case most ungrate- 
fully requited by his government. 

26. Other Historians. — Richard Hildreth, 
like Motley and Parkman, began his literary career 
by an unimportant essay in fiction, — his Archy 
Moore (1837) being directed against slavery, whose 
evils the author, like Channing, had personally seen. 
Various minor writings in politics, finance, and 
ethics preceded his rapidly written History of the 
Ufiited States from the discovery of America to the 
end of Monroe's first presidential term. Its style 
is somewhat dry, its sympathies with the Federalist- 
Whig idea of the government are sometimes over- 
conspicuous, and it is now little read ; but, as the 
most extended view of the period covered, it still 
forms a useful supplement to Bancroft. John 
Gorham Palfrey, another Massachusetts historian, 
who for the first fifty years of his life was a student 
of biblical literature and a politician, began in 1858 
a History of New England^ which, with no great 
charm of language, holds a high rank for complete- 



62 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

ness and accuracy. No other part of the country 
has found so full a historian. Four volumes had 
been issued previous to the author's death in 1881 ; 
another was posthumously published. Jared Sparks, 
president of Harvard between 1849 and 1852, wrote 
several biographies and theological works, edited 
the Diploinatic Correspondence of the Aiiierican Revo- 
lution^ and brought out between 1834 and 1837, in 
twelve volumes, Washington's writings, together 
with a life. In 1840 he finished a similar edition 
of Franklin, in ten volumes. Sparks' Washington 
and Franklin have been supplanted by later, larger, 
and more scrupulously edited editions (for he 
took liberties of correction and omission not now 
deemed permissible in the publication of manu- 
scripts) ; but these works, together with the Z/- 
brary of American Biography edited by him, were 
pioneer toils of distinct serviceableness to students 
of American history. 

27. Fiction. — James Fenimore Cooper. — 
Charles Brockden Brown began the long line of 
American novels, but James Fenimore Cooper was 
the first writer of fiction to be read extensively. 
Born in Burlington, New Jerse}^, in 1789, he spent 
his boyhood at Cooperstown, Otsego County, New 
York, a village founded by his father in 1786. 
Having studied three years at Yale, he entered the 
navy as midshipman in 1805, remaining in the 
service six years, and acquiring that knowledge of 
the sea which he afterwards put to such good use 



FICTION. 63 

in his books. Precaution^ his first novel, was pub- 
lished anonymously in 182 1. It met with no great 
success, being a tame story of the English type. 
The Spy (1821) found a multitude of admirers, and 
was republished in Europe in many translations. 
This historical story of the Revolution, as well as 
The Pioneers^ issued the next year, smacked of the 
soil, and Cooper thenceforward occupied as his own 
the field of wild life in the West. His novels were 
full of romantic interest, and showed the public 
that American scenery and life furnished as good 
a foundation for fiction as the castles and romance 
of Europe. The Last of the Mohica?is (1826) is one 
of the best of the remarkable group of stories called 
the Leather Stocking Tales, which remain his great- 
est creation, with Natty Bumppo, the tough, manly, 
and kindly Pathfinder, as their central figure. 
Cooper was American through and through. He 
did not hesitate in some of his later stories to 
satirize the " louder '' national characteristics ; but 
to him more than any other author is due the 
increasing attention to home subjects and heroes. 
From his writings, undoubtedly, a part of the 
English public got the impression, which it has 
with difficulty corrected, that buffaloes and Indians 
form the most conspicuous features in our civiliza- 
tion. Some of Cooper's better works were devoted 
to the sea, the most successful being The Pilot 
(1823) and The Red Paver (1827). Cooper's quar- 
rels with his countrymen were numerous, chiefly 



64 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

because he thought them lukewarm in national 
pride ; and he increased the hostility of the news- 
paper press by several libel suits, in many of which 
he was successful. The Pathfinder and The Deer- 
slayer appeared in 1840 and 1841 ; and Afloat and 
Ashore three years later. An ambitious but partisan 
and ephemeral Naval History of the United States 
and a series of biographies of naval officers were 
among the other writings of this industrious author, 
who by no means confined himself to a single field. 
His last book was The Ways of the Hour., an attack 
on the system of trial by jury, in the form of a story, 
somewhat in the style later adopted by Charles 
Reade. Cooper's novels won high praise from 
contemporary critical authorities, including Bryant 
and Prescott; but his later books found fewer 
readers than their predecessors. He virtually had 
the field to himself, at first, and the novelty of his 
subjects aroused in his writings an interest which 
their intrinsic literary merits hardly warranted, as 
his style was often slovenly, his humor sometimes 
forced, and his power of delineating women but 
feeble. 

28. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom James Rus- 
sell Lowell has called the greatest imaginative 
writer since Shakespeare, was born in Salem in 
1804, of an old colonial family, some of whose 
members, as a matter of conviction, had taken part 
in the persecutions which made the early history of 
that town so famous. In later years the Haw- 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 65 

thornes (who spelled their name Hathorne) had 
followed the sea, and Nathaniel's father, a ship- 
master, died at Surinam in 1808. From his mother 
the boy inherited a serious disposition, she having 
so grieved over her husband's loss that for thirty 
years she insisted on isolating herself in her room. 
Nathaniel was a feeble child, but was able to enter 
Bowdoin College at seventeen, where Longfellow 
was his classmate. His intimate friend, however, 
was Franklin Pierce, a member of the class next 
above him. On graduation he returned to Salem, 
and outdid his mother in absolute seclusion, writing 
all day, and stalking over the ancient town at night. 
Fanshawe, an anonymous romance, was published 
in Boston in 1828, but was never acknowledged by 
the author. For years it was a great literary curi- 
osity, but was reprinted in 1876. It is a somewhat 
crude production, but not unmarked by the power 
which afterwards made the author famous. In 1836 
Hawthorne became the editor, for six months, of 
the America?! Magazine of Knowledge, published in 
Boston ; but, though nominally only editor, he wrote 
or prepared its entire contents. He had destroyed 
many of his earlier sketches, but by 1837 he was 
able to collect enough stories to form the first series 
of Twice-Told Tales, Longfellow and other critics 
saw and said what they were, but the general public 
failed to appreciate them. This first edition con- 
tained only half the present work ; a revision, with 
a second series, appeared in 1842, and found a few 



e^ A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

more readers. Bancroft, who was then collector of 
the port of Boston, gave Hawthorne a place in the 
custom-house in that city, which he lost on the 
accession of Harrison to the presidency in 1841. 
A short sojourn at the famous Brook Farm in West 
Roxbury followed ; and everywhere the shy, myste- 
rious romancer was the shrewdest and minutest of 
observers. In 1843 ^^^ ^^^^ "P ^is abode in the 
old Ripley house at Concord, close by the bridge 
where the ^' embattled farmers stood." Hawthorne's 
residence in old houses was partly from accident 
and partly from choice ; but of all his homes this 
was most to his liking, and in the volumes called 
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) he celebrated it 
in the choicest language. This collection of stories 
and sketches was in the same general style as the 
Twice- Told Tales. Emerson had been a former 
occupant of the house, and Hawthorne's Concord 
neighbors were Emerson, Thoreau, and the younger 
Ellery Channing. In 1846 Haw^thorne became 
surveyor at the Salem custom-house, and, as usual, 
made his residence there an opportunity for the 
industrious collection of literary material. The 
advent of the Whigs into power, for the second 
time, once more displaced him from office, and he 
retired to a little cottage in Lenox, Massachusetts, 
having published in 1850 The Scarlet Letter^ a 
powerful and dramatic colonial romance of sin and 
penalty. At Lenox Hawthorne was unusually in- 
dustrious, writing in 185 1 The House of the Seven 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 67 

Gables, a tale of heredity, told in a form at once 
powerful and pleasing, and embodying, more than 
any other of his books, his Salem life. The Blithe- 
dale Romance (1852) was founded on his Brook 
Farm experiences, and combined lofty humor with 
deep pathos. The same year, 1852, Hawthorne 
wrote a third series of Twice-Told Talcs, and a 
campaign life of Pierce, for whom, ever since his 
college days, he had maintained a strong friendship. 
But there was no suspicion of office-seeking on 
Hawthorne's part, and when, in 1853, the romancer 
was given the Liverpool consulate, both parties 
rejoiced. For the first time in his life Hawthorne 
was in easy circumstances, though a thriftier man 
would have made more money out of his lucrative 
position. Resigning in 1857, he spent three years 
in England, France, and Italy. His English and 
Italian Note-Books, published posthumously, are 
full of the experiences of one of the best of sight- 
seers. The America7i Note-Books consist of his home 
diaries, and contain many unused hints for 'books 
or stories which none but Hawthorne ever could 
have written. Our Old Home, sights and scenes 
in England, was published in 1863, during the 
author's lifetime. The Marble Faufi had appeared 
in i860, — an Italian romance showing the blight 
of crime upon innocence. Hawthorne had also 
brought out three juvenile books between 1 851 and 
1853, — stories of history and mythology; and after 
his death were found the fragments called The 



68 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

Ancestral Footstep, Doctor Gri77isJiawe' s Secret, Sep- 
timius Felton, and The Dolliver Romance, — all of 
which, in order, were studies for the same never- 
finished book. So ends the list of the works of the 
foremost American v/riter. 

29. Other Novelists. — Sylvester Judd, a Uni- 
tarian minister, wrote in 1845 Margaret: a Tale of 
the Real and the Tdeal ; which Lowell, in his Fable 
for Critics, declared *' the first Yankee book with 
the soul of Down East in 't ; " while others found 
its whims and crotchets so numerous as to make it 
almost unreadable. It deserves record, if at all, 
only as an early attempt to treat New England life 
spiritually. William Gilmore Simms, who sought 
to do for the South what Cooper had done for the 
North, was born in 1806 and died in 1870. He 
wrote many poems, but is chiefly remembered by 
his novels, among which are The Yemassee, The 
Pa7'tisa7i, and Beauchampe, John Esten Cooke, of 
Virginia, was less versatile, but his novels of South- 
ern life are more meritorious. The best of them 
is The Virginia Co77iedians, a picture of courtly tide- 
water Virginia in the eighteenth century. John P. 
Kennedy, secretary of the navy under Fillmore, 
wrote good novels of old-time society, in his Swal- 
low Ba7'7i and Horse- Shoe Robi7tson ; and Herman 
Melville vigorous sea tales. Harriet Beecher 
Stow^e's U7icle To77i's Cahi7i (1852), directed against 
slaver}^, has had the greatest popular success of 
any American book, having sold more than half a 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 69 

million copies in this country alone, and having 
been forty times translated. It directly and last- 
ingly promoted the anti-slavery cause, as well as 
the success of the Northern arms in the civil 
war ; while its large humanity and its interesting- 
ness as a story have given it a vigorous life after 
the downfall of the system it so effectively de- 
nounced. Mrs. Stowe's later novels, though some- 
times superior from a literary point of view, have 
naturally appealed to a more limited interest. The 
Minister's Wooing and The Pearl of Orrs Island are 
faithful New England pictures ; and Oldtown Folks, 
one of her later books, introduces her best cre- 
ation, Sam Lawson, the typical New England 
ne'er-do-well, who reappears to better advantage in 
Sam Lawson' s Oldtown Fireside Stories, Next to 
Uncle Tom, as a popular success, came the senti- 
mental and lachrymose Wide, Wide World of Susan 
Warner, published in 1850. 

30. Ralph Waldo Emerson. — Ralph Waldo 
Emerson (1803-1882) was the greatest of Ameri- 
can essayists, and his influence on thought and 
style has been so marked as to make Concord our 
literary Mecca. The descendant of eight gener- 
ations of clergymen, Emerson was a Bostonian by 
birth, and graduated at Harvard in 182 1. Between 
1829 and 1832 he was a Unitarian minister, but 
left the pulpit in consequence of his radical opin- 
ions. Having made a short trip to Europe, he 
began his career as a lecturer, in v;hich capacity 



70 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

he became more famous than any other American 
author. A slender book on Nature made a great 
stir among thoughtful people in 1836. In this — 
as in his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address on The 
American Scholar (1837), his Harvard Divinity 
School address (1838) on the continuance of spirit- 
ual revelation in the world, and his Dartmouth 
College oration (1838) on Literary Ethics — he set 
forth a positive philosophy of idealism, optimism, 
and individuahsm as against materialism, pessimism, 
and obedience to sacerdotal or traditional author- 
ity. Nature, to him, was the friend and monitor 
of man ; and the soul was in illuminating com- 
munion with the spirit of all good. This philoso- 
phy, in terse and not always obvious statements, 
he iterated in book, poem, lecture, or address, to 
the end of his life. Naturally, therefore, his influ- 
ence became very great in forming the ^* Tran- 
scendental " movement, — an attempt to abandon 
traditional forms and society's chains and to get 
back to nature's freedom of thought and rectitude 
of action. The Dial was the organ of the school, 
and Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, 
and the younger Channing wrote for it. Emerson's 
two series of Essays appeared in 1841 and 1844 ; 
Represe?itative Men^ a course of lectures, in 1850 ; 
E7iglish Traits in 1856 ; The Co7iduct of Life in 
i860; Society and Solitude in 1870; and Letters 
and Social Aims in 1876, in which year a carefully 
revised edition of his poems v;as also published. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 71 

These poems are full of high thought, often ex- 
pressed with rare beauty. Both in poetry and in 
prose his influence is as spontaneous as that of 
nature ; he announces, and lets others plead. He 
turns to verse when seeking special force and con- 
ciseness, and therefore his poems are written, in 
his own words, ^' for thought, and not praise," for 
value rather than artistic form. Yet the best of 
them display the outer as well as the inner -beauty 
of verse, both of which unite in the nature-painting 
of The Rhodora or The Snow-Siorfn ; the virile pa- 
triotism of the Concord Hy77in ; the grim force of 
Hamatreya ; the lyrical pathos of Good-Bye^ Proud 
World; the deep philosophy of Days; or the 
majesty of Brah77ia, But Emerson is not less sig- 
nificant in those lines, couplets, quatrains, or frag- 
ments w^hich he never rounded into complete 
poems, for instance: — 

" Unless to Thought is added Will, 
Apollo is an imbecile," 

" The brook sings on, but sings in vain. 
Wanting the echo in my brain." 

** On bravely through the sunshine and the showers 1 
Time hath his work to do and we have ours." 

" Thou shalt not try 
To plant thy shrivelled pedantry 
On the shoulders of the sky." 

*'No fate, save by the victim's fault, is low. 
For God hath writ all dooms magnificent 
So guilt not traverses his tender will." 



T2 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

" Tell men what they knew before ; 
Paint the prospect from their door." 

31. Other Transcendentalists. — Henry D. 
Thoreau was a recluse who once lived on the 
shores of Walden Pond, in Concord, providing for 
his simple wants by surveying and gardening. 
Walden is his best book, but in other volumes he 
carries the reader straight to Nature's heart. Amos 
Bronson Alcott, at first an educator, was long the 
sole representative in this country of the art of im- 
parting knowledge by "conversations," which he 
conducted for many years in various parts of the 
United States, though residing in Concord. In his 
later life he collected some of his writings into 
books, and wrote a volume of sonnets in his eighty- 
second year. William EUery Channing, a nephew 
of the famous divine, wrote a biography of Thoreau 
and four volumes of poems. But the best and most 
enduring poetry, save Emerson's, written during 
the period of Transcendental influence in America 
was that of Jones Very, of Salem, — in personal Hfe 
a recluse, but in spiritual stature among the very 
first of our singers. Emerson compared his sonnets 
with the utterances of the Hebrew prophets, and 
declared them inferior only " because they are in- 
debted to the Hebrew muse for their tone and 
genius." Very felt himself to be in constant com- 
munion with the Divine spirit, whose messages he 
strove to read from the books of nature and the 
soul. He chiefly wrote in the sonnet form, and 



MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, 73 

many of his lines are deep in thought and strong 
in expression. Hawthorne called Very a " poet 
whose voice is scarcely heard among us by reason 
of its depth ; " but at another time, with that clear 
sense which governed his every word, he stated his 
belief that Very's limitations arose from his '' want 
of a sense of the ludicrous." 

32. Miscellaneous Writers. — George William 
Curtis, a representative of civic integrity in Amer- 
ican life, and in his style a worthy follower of Addi- 
son, produced a great number of essays in periodi- 
cals ; two graceful books of eastern travel ; The 
Potiphar Papers^ the best social satire produced in 
this country ; Trumps^ a readable but somewhat 
amateurish novel ; and several volumes of fervid 
and finished orations. George Ticknor, professor 
of modern languages at Harvard between 18 17 and 
1835, published in 1849 ^^ elaborate History of 
Spanish Literatu?'e, twdce since revised, and ac- 
cepted here and abroad as the standard. Edwin 
P. Whipple, one of the most faithful of American 
critics, though he produced nothing large or lasting, 
in his several volumes gave a thorough review of 
many of the best English and American books, — 
his researches in Elizabethan literature being his 
chief work. The Two Years before the Mast of 
Richard H. Dana, Jr., a record of personal experi- 
ence, is almost the only American book of travel that 
has been given more than a fleeting place in litera- 
ture. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's Appeal in Behalf 



74 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

of that Class of Americans called Africans (1832) is 
noteworthy as the first contribution of a woman to 
the antislavery literature of the country. It was an 
admirable little work, and helped to carry Wendell 
Phillips into the antislavery movement. Margaret 
Fuller, an ardent Transcendentalist, and editor of 
The Dial, left no permanent literary memorial in 
book form, but in editorial and critical writing 
affected the liberal thought of her time. Donald 
G. Mitchell wrote Drea77i-Life and The Reveries of 
a Bachelor, pleasant books of chat and meditation, 
which have never lost their hold on popularity. 
Dr. J. G. Holland was a wholesome and plain- 
spoken popular essayist, and wrote some fair novels 
of American life, — Miss Gilberfs Career, Arthur 
Bo7inicastle, and The Story of Sevenoaks being the 
best of them. As a poet, in his Bitter-Sweet and 
Kathrina, he was equally popular, though with less 
deserts. 

7^;^,. Scientific and Special Writers. — In lit- 
erature the artistic form and the consequent im- 
pression of pleasurableness are essential ; without 
these, the quality of instructive value, however 
manifest or important, does not suffice to produce 
literature. But the student of American thought 
may properly note some of the larger contributions 
made, in this country, to special or technical know- 
ledge. In law and politics the number of American 
books is of course large, but none save the Com- 
mentaries on American Law of James Kent need 



HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 75 

be mentioned here. The dictionaries of Noah 
Webster and Joseph E. Worcester, and the larger 
Century Dictionary of William D. Whitney and his 
colleagues ; the philological works of George P. 
Marsh ; the botanical writings of Asa Gray ; the 
mathematical and astronomical publications of Ben- 
jamin Peirce, whose Ideality in the Physical Sciences 
is a piece of literature ; the ornithological studies of 
John James Audubon ; the geological treatises of 
Louis Agassiz ; and Horace Howard Furness's 
variorum edition of Shakespeare, — are contribu- 
tions to the learning of the world. 

HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 

Warner's Washington Irvitig gives a good account of the 
beginning of our literature, pure and simple, especially as re- 
lated to the European impact, and the influence of senti- 
ment. 

Bigelow's William Ctillen Bryant portrsiys the austere self- 
respecting character of Bryant as a conservative force in 
American letters. 

Samuel Longfellow's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a 
storehouse of memorabilia, and presents (as do the Cambridge 
editions of Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes) many interest- 
ing statements concerning the composition of various poems, 
or the persons and places to which they relate. 

Lowell's Fable for Critics and Poe's The Literati may be 
read as giving a view of the American literary field half a cen- 
tury ago. 

Woodberry's Edgar Allaii Foe (or, better, his introductory 
memoir to the new edition of Poe by himself and E. C. Sted- 
man) may be accepted as the final authority on the character 



76 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE, 

and career of the man. The Stedman-Woodberry collection 
of Poe's complete works is the most thoroughly prepared 
edition of an American classic writer. 

Holmes' John Lothrop Motley is one of the half-dozen best 
American biographies. 

Lounsbury's James Fenimore Cocper is indispensable for a 
sound knowledge of that novelist's work as related to his 
time. 

Julian Hawthorne's Nathaniel HawtJiorne and his Wife is 
the best life-story of the romancer, and analysis of his mind 
and method. 

The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence^ amid all the mass 
of Emersoniana, is the work most helpful to the student, as 
illustrating Emerson's mental processes. 



CHAPTER IV. 

AFTER 1861. 

I. Literature of the Civil War. — It is still 
convenient to follow the division of time by wars, 
omitting that with Mexico, which formed no break 
in current history. As in the Revolution and the 
war of 18 1 2, little that was notable was added to 
the literature of the country by the civil war of 1861. 
Most of the poets wrote one or two stirring pieces, 
and new writers came into notice by the publication 
of meritorious occasional verse. But as a rule the 
creative powers of our best authors seemed some- 
what benumbed, though books and readers multi- 
plied between 1861 and 1865, partly in consequence 
of the largely increased circulation of the periodical 
press. Immediately on the close of the struggle, 
and even during its progress, many popular histo- 
ries were hurried upon the market, but of course 
the events described were yet too fresh in mind to 
permit impartiality on either side. A large RebeU 
lion Record^ edited by Frank Moore, has preserved 
plenty of material for the future writer. This use- 
ful work is arranged under three divisions ; a diary 
of events, a reissue of leading documents of impor- 
tance, and a liberal selection from popular poe- 



yS A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURK. 

try and newspaper incidents on both sides. The 
United States government, furthermore, is publish- 
ing a veritable library of Official Records of the War 
of the Rebellion^ without historical comment. A ten- 
volume life of Abraham Lincobi^ by John G. Nicolay 
and John Hay, is virtually an important document- 
ary history of his administration. Of the tenta- 
tive or temporary histories that have thus far ap- 
peared, those by Horace Greeley and Alexander 
H. Stephens are fullest in their accounts of the anti- 
slavery contest which preceded and attended the 
war. The first volume of Mr. Greeley's history 
(which is comprised in tv/o) is more valuable than 
the second, for in it a life-long combatant in the 
antislavery struggle records the events with which 
he was so closely connected. Mr. Stephens's work 
lays great stress upon the rise and development of 
the doctrine of state rights, of which the author was 
an able defender. Elaborate as is Mr. Greeley's 
story of the slavery agitation, a still larger history 
thereof is contained in Vice-President Wilson's Rise 
and Fall of the Slave Power in America^ in three 
volumes. Mr. Wilson's knowledge of political his- 
tory v/as as extensive as Mr. Greeley's, and the 
judicial quality of his mind somewhat more marked. 
He had the advantage, furthermore, of writing some 
time after the close of the war. Many of the gen- 
erals engaged on either side have published their 
reminiscences of campaigns, at greater or less length. 
From out the lurid background of the whole civil- 



POETS. 79 

war period stands the sombre but kindly figure of 
Abraham Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Ad^/ress a,nd 
Second/ Inaugural have become classics of recent 
oratory in English. 

2. Poets. — Intellectual activity of various kinds 
having been promoted by the war, a renewed in- 
terest in purely national or local subjects, in this 
country, accompanied, rather than was caused by, 
the new-romanticism of the English writers of the 
Swinburne school, who found in our Whitman and 
Miller greater merits than in the more conventional 
writers whom the majority of readers are accus- 
tomed to revere. These poets' celebration of the 
wilder elements in our life, and their freedom from 
restraint, seemed admirable to London-bred critics ; 
and their English friends doubtless took pleasure 
in singling out for special praise writers whose cli- 
entage was not so numerous in this country, and 
whose subjects would seem stranger in London 
than in New York. The old inattention to our lit- 
erature, on the part of Englishmen, gave place to a 
somewhat injudicious and undiscriminating praise. 
But, fostered by home development and foreign 
admiration, there has latterly grown — in verse, 
but still more in indigenous American fiction — a 
properly original and characteristic spirit in Amer- 
ican literature. The great majority of our singers, 
however, have been content to work faithfully in 
the old paths, and many living authors, popularly 
assigned to the second rank, may fairly be called the 



So A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

peers of some of their predecessors of higher repu- 
tation. Meanwhile, with few exceptions, iVmerican 
literature, in poetry and in prose, remains more 
free than any other from immoral taint of theme 
or treatment. It is the literature of new freedom, 
not of old license. 

3. Bayard Taylor — traveller, journalist, lec- 
turer, poet, novelist, and diplomat — had attained 
literary repute before the date at which this chap- 
ter begins ; but, since any possible future renown 
of his must rest upon his volumes of poems pub- 
lished since 1862, it is well to enter his name in this 
place. He was born at Kennett Square, a Penn- 
sylvania country town, in 1825, and while a very 
young man wrote a vivacious account of a pedes- 
trian tour in Europe, w^hich was followed by similar 
narratives of other journeyings. In 1863 Mr. Tay- 
lor published his first novel, Hannah Thurstojt^ 
which was followed within the next seven years by 
yohn Godfrey's Fo7'times^ The Story of Keiinett^ 
and Joseph and his Frie7td, These four novels, 
besides ingeniousness of plot and cleverness of 
situation, contain accurate pictures of American 
life, especially that of the Quaker region of Penn- 
sylvania, wdiich the author knew thoroughly. Be- 
tween 1844 and 1855 he put forth seven volumes 
of poems, chiefly notew^orthy for verbal excellence 
rather than for any depth of thought or significance 
of value. The Poefs Journal (1862), The Picture 
of St, John (1866), The Masque of the Gods (1872), 



EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 8i 

Lars (1873), and The Prophet (1874), a Mormon 
drama, are more elaborate works. Frmce Deu- 
kalio7i^ an allegorical drama of social progress — 
ambitious, but not so successful as the author 
hoped, — appeared in 1878. Some of his longer 
poems were produced with a rapidity recalling the 
Italian improvisafo)^. The Echo Club (published 
in 1876, though written in 1872) is a series of 
clever imitations of the leading poets of the cen- 
tur}^ A translation of both parts of Faust ap- 
peared in 1870 and 187 1, in which the original 
metres were reproduced with surprising faithful- 
ness. Taylor died in 1878 (when minister to Ger- 
many), worn out by his too ready yielding to the 
multifarious demands of modern intellectual and 
social life ; and leaving undone that which he 
meant to make his chief work, — a life of Goethe. 

4. Richard Henry Stoddard, in a life-long ser- 
vice to letters, has been critic, editor, biographer, 
librarian ; but his devotion to the art and practice 
of poetry has been incessant, and his numerous 
volumes — chiefly composed of short poems of 
mood or of picture — have shown the lyric quality. 
His early Hymin to the Beautiful^ notwithstand- 
ing some obvious suggestions of the influence 
of Wordsworth, remains his most representative 
achievement, and one of the best of recent expres- 
sions of the poet's view of the w^orld of life and 
beauty. 

5. Edmund Clarence Stedman has for the 



82 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

most of his life been a banker in New York, though 
writing constantly for the press. Alice of Mon- 
mouth^ a war story in verse, succeeded Poe7ns^ Lyric 
and Idyllic, The Blaineless Prince was Mr. Sted- 
man's third volume. These three books were 
chiefly excellent for purely lyrical beauty. In 1873 
appeared the first collected edition of his poems. 
Hawthorite and Other Poems (1877), a thin vol- 
ume, included later pieces, the first being the finest 
tribute yet paid in verse to the memory of the ro- 
mancer. In his Victorian Poets (1876) appeared 
an elaborate review of the entire body of contem- 
porary English poetry. It is especially just toward 
the new romantic school, with the works of the 
humblest members of which Mr. Stedman is inti- 
mately acquainted. It w^as followed by a similarly 
comprehensive study of the Poets of America (1885), 
very useful to the student of American literature ; 
and this, in turn, by a studious review of the whole 
subject of The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892), 
which forms the most valuable of the methodical 
contributions thus far made in America to the lit- 
erature of aesthetic criticism. 

6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich is one of sev- 
eral natives of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who 
have entered the field of literature. His boy- 
hood was passed in that ancient seaport town, in 
New Orleans, and in New York. Before he was 
twenty he became a worker on the New York press, 
and his first book was published when he was but 



THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICIL 83 

nineteen. The Ballad of Babie Bell (afterwards 
entitled Baby Bell)^ a tender poem of child-death, 
has had for many years a place in popular favor. 
Between 1855 and 1862 Mr. Aldrich published sev- 
eral small volumes of poems, a little juvenile story 
in prose, and Out of his Head, a romance never re- 
issued by the author; while in 1865 he collected 
his complete poetical works in a single volume. 
He has always been, like Poe, an inveterate critic 
of his ow^n lines ; and, usually recognizing the fact 
that his successes must be won by daintiness of 
execution rather than by largeness of construction, 
he has touched and retouched, not always to the 
im.provement of the original product. Occasionally 
making an essay toward the drama, as in Mercedes 
(1884), or long narrative, as in F?iar Jerome's 
Beautiful Book^ Ganiant Hall, or Wymdham Tow- 
ers (1889), he has not won thereby a repute equal 
to that attained by such short poems as Destiny or 
Ideiitity. Mr. Aldrich's collected edition of 1865 
was carefully revised ten years later, and put forth 
under the title of Cloth of Gold. Flower and Thorn 
(1876) comprised such additional poems as the 
author then cared to preserve. After a consider- 
able pause, Mr. Aldrich began to write prose once 
more, in the form of short stories and sketches, 
having, as in the enjoyable volume entitled Mar- 
jorie Daw and Other Pieces (1873), a dainty humor 
and no little cleverness of situation. The Story of 
a Bad Boy (1869), ^^^^ second juvenile, reproduced 



84 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE. 

in its Tom Bailey the author's youthful experiences 
ill Portsmouth, which, as ^' Rivermouth," appears 
in nearly all his stories. Prudence Palfrey (1874), 
The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stilhvater Tra- 
gedy (1880) are novels of moderate length, having, 
in substance, the finish and quiet humor of the 
shorter stories. 

7. Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long 
Island, in 18 19, and began life as a school-teacher 
and literary man, writing rather feeble stories and 
indifferent poems for the magazines, in the ordinary 
style, under the name of Walter Whitman. In 
1855, I'educing Walter to Walt, he printed in Brook- 
lyn a peculiar volume called Leaves of Gj^ass, — 
rhapsody rather than poetry, being neither rhymed 
nor versified. This work, which he enlarged from 
time to time, is devoted to a large variety of subjects, 
many of the poems being personal, while all are 
pervaded with a love of liberty in conscience and 
politics. The catalogue style is a prevailing blem- 
ish, and Whitman's overruling desire to be natural 
made him fall into real affectations ; but there are 
some strong and fine lines in the poems. O Captain^ 
viy Captain^ showed him to be unfettered when 
using rhyme. When Lilacs last in the Dooryard 
bloomed is the best poem evoked by the assassina- 
tion of President Lincoln. Many of the poems in 
Leaves of Grass are grossly indecent, and ^' the up- 
ward look " is conspicuously absent from Whitman's 
verse. The Vv^orld's great poets have been morally 



Ol^HER POETS. 85 

in advance of their times ; Whitman lags behind the 
average sentiment of his day and country. His 
death occurred in 1892. 

8. Other Poets. — John Townsend Trowbridge, 
the author of numerous cheery juvenile stories and 
pleasant novels, of which Ncighbo7' Jackwood (1857) 
remains the best (considered as a picture of Ameri- 
can home life in the country), has expended care 
in the writing of his relatively few poems, of which 
The Vagabonds (1864) is widely known for its 
excellent union of pathos and humor. Of Northern 
poems of the war, by writers not elsewhere men- 
tioned, the best are Thomas Buchanan Read's 
Sheridan's Ride^ Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn 
of the Republic, and Francis M. Finch's The Blue 
and the Gray. In the Southern newspapers, during 
and after the civil war, there was a considerable 
amount of verse related to the struggle, the master- 
piece being Father A. J. Ryan's The Co?ifederate 
Flag. Henry Timrod's Spri?tg is better than any 
of his rapidly written martial verse. Paul H. 
Hayne, of Georgia, was one of our best sonneteers ; 
his poetry catches the spirit of Southern scenery, 
and is instinct with sensibility. He was less suc- 
cessful in depicting the scenes and portraying the 
character of mediaevalism. Sidney Lanier wrote in 
1876 a curious Ce?iten?tial Ode to Columbia, which 
aimed to be in poetry some such thing as Wagner's 
music is in orchestration. Lanier was musician 
and critic as well as poet, and sometimes his verse 



86 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

was injured by its self-conscious art. But his best 
pieces, such as Cor?z^ The Song of the Chattahoochee^ 
Sunrise^ or that melodious lyric The Marshes of 
Gly7m^ have attracted an attention bestowed upon 
the work of no other Southern poet since Poe. 
After the close of the struggle appeared a fashion 
for dialect verse, largely devoted to the celebration 
of profane heroes or ungrammatical wits ; of verse 
of this sort all has been forgotten savx the Hans 
Breitmann' s Ballads of Charles G. Leland, the 
Betsey and I are Out of Will Carleton, the Jim 
Bludso and Little Breeches of John Hay, and the 
Flai7i Language from Truthful fames (popularly 
known as "The Heathen Chinee") of Bret Harte. 
At about the same time Joaquin Miller, a sort of 
Oregon Byron in red shirt, cowhide boots, and 
buffalo robe, delighted aesthetic London with his 
Songs of the Sierras^ — wild poems of the west, 
chiefly relying upon their novelty of theme, and the 
natural swing of their easy versification. But some 
later writers — notably James Whitcomb Riley and 
Eugene Field — have retained what was good in the 
method of our earlier singers of sentimentalism, 
dialect humor, and local delineation, adding thereto 
a genuineness of feeling and a delicacy of expres- 
sion not usually shown by their predecessors. On 
the other hand, Richard Watson Gilder has found 
his chief models in the work of Dante and other 
Italians ; and much of his verse, like Aldrich's, has 
been the rhythmical expression of semi-mystical 



FRANCIS BRET HARTE. S7 

thought or delicate conceit. Of women who have 
done creditable work in verse, in recent years, the 
number is large ; indeed, half the poems in current 
periodicals are by women. As a rule they WTite 
short poems of mood or description rather than of 
creation or narration, or even of sentiment, though 
Elizabeth Akers Allen's Rock me to Sleepy Mother, 
and Lucy La room's ITannah Binding Shoes are 
exceptions to this remark. Celia Thaxter's breezy 
poems of the sea are the fruit of long acquaintance 
wdth the barren and wind-swept Isles of Shoals. 
To Helen Fiske Jackson belongs the first place 
among American women who have written verse. 
Soon after the appearance of her first volume of 
poems, in 1874, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote : 
" The poems of a lady who contents herself with 
the initials H. H. have rare merit of thought and 
expression, and will reward the reader for the care- 
ful attention wdiich they require." There is some- 
what of the Emersonian mood and method in Mrs. 
Jackson's poetry, which is the modern successor of 
The Dial verse of 1840. In the latter part of her 
life she became intensely interested in the Indian 
question, and wTote A Centicry of Dishonor^ and the 
novel Ramona, to help in righting the wrongs of the 
aboriginal race. 

9. Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, 
New York, rose in 1870 to a position of almost 
commanding significance, in America and Europe, 
as the delineator of pioneer life and its rude 



88 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN IITERA TURE. 

environment in the mining camps of the new west. 
Possessing both humor and pathos, a keen power 
of observation, and a firm touch, he portrayed the 
human heart as it beat under flannel shirt or tawdry 
ball-dress. The Luck of Roaring Ca77ip^ The Out- 
casts of Poker Flat, and How Santa Clans came to 
Simpso7i^s Bar were important in exploiting a new 
field, and in giving a powerful impulse to the most 
successful of recent movements in American litera- 
ture : the development of the short story of locality, 
showing men and women as they are and as they 
live, — in faithful realism, but with a trend toward 
that optimism which finds progress, rather than 
continuance or retrogression, the secret of social 
life. Though Mr. Harte has since produced thirty 
or forty volumes, and regularly wTites one or two a 
year, he has never been able, in his stories, sketches, 
novels, plays, or poems, to do more than return to 
his first field and method, not adding materially 
to the success then won. Indeed, had his writing 
ceased in 1875, ^^^ place in our literature would 
have been what it is to-day. 

10. The American Short Story. — Bret Harte 
once modestly remarked that he was " quite con- 
tent to have collected merely the materials for the 
Iliad that is yet to be sung." Just here lies the 
greatest significance of his own best work, and that 
of his many fellow-laborers, who, in the closing 
quarter of the nineteenth century, have made so 
admirable, and in a way so enduringly valuable. 



HIE AMERICAN SHORT STORY. 89 

contributions to the literature of minor fiction. 
When one thinks of Irving's Hudson legends and 
Spanish stories, of Hawthorne's Twice- Ibid Tales ^ 
and of Poe's Tales of the Gi'otesque and the A?'a- 
besque^ and then recalls the long list of excellent 
short stories written in the United States since 
1870, he is ready to claim that in this division the 
American mind has surpassed all others. The 
later American short story has been sincere in pur- 
pose, painstaking in realism, and hopeful in senti- 
ment. With or without the use of dialect, it has 
portrayed scenes and characters as they have been 
or as they are, chiefly caring for the heart of things 
rather than for the accidents of life. Pathos and 
humor have bent to the service of an accurate rep- 
resentation of different types and environments ; 
and, in this broad work in a land stretching from 
ocean to ocean and from lake to gulf, many authors 
have made minor contributions. The masters of 
American fiction are now dead, but their lesser suc- 
cessors — with Gallic fidelity but with Teutonic 
morality — have continued to work toward a com- 
posite creation which is commanding in its entirety, 
though not indispensable in its parts. Most of 
these later wTiters, like Harte, have over-multiplied 
their books, and some have exhausted their mate- 
rial ; but, after all, no previous period in American 
literature could have given us, in thought or exe- 
cution, the New England pictures presented in 
Sarah Orne Jew^ett's Deephaven and A White ITeroii^ 



90 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE. 

or Mary E. Wilkins' A Humble Romance and Jane 
Field ; the homely folk of Philander Deming's 
Adirondack Stories; the preposterous but nobly 
self-sacrificing little ritualist shown in Constance 
Fenimore Woolson's Peter the Paron, in a Michi- 
gan mining-village ; the similar heroism of Mary N. 
Murfree's rough Prophet of the Great Smoky Moun- 
tains in Tennessee ; or the African folk-lore of Joel 
Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus down in Georgia. 
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a daughter of Professor 
Austin Phelps of the theological seminary at An- 
dover, is another of the writers of the remarkable 
short stories which distinguish the present time. 
The chief of her lesser tales were first collected in 
Men^ Women, and Ghosts (1869), in which The 
Tenth of January (a tale of the fall of the Pember- 
ton Mills in Lawrence) was the strongest piece of 
writing. Besides many Sunday-school stories and 
other juvenile books, Miss Phelps has written such 
novels as Hedged In (1870), The Silent Pa7'tner 
(1871), The Story of Avis (1877), a dramatic and 
highly wrought record of the struggles of a woman's 
soul, Friends : A Duet (188 1), Doctor Zay (1884), 
and several later tales characterized by a more or 
less intense individuality of personal portrayal, — 
such as was found in her Gates Ajar, an original 
book on heaven, which made no small literary sen- 
sation in 1868. But it may be questioned w^hether 
her greatest strength and the groundwork of her 
ultimate repute are not likely to be found in the 



WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS, 91 

Men^ IVomen, and Ghosts collection, or in such a lit- 
erary unit as the tragedy of J^ack the Fisherman of 
Gloucester. As a rule, in American stories written 
since the civil war, expansion of theme has brought 
no gain of artistic force. In this division of fiction, 
though books be forgotten and reputations dwindle, 
the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. 
In one instance — that to be found in a part of 
the work of Frances Hodgson Burnett — the newer 
American localism has overstepped the waters of 
the Atlantic in search of a theme ; for, if her pic- 
tures of Southern types in A Fair Barbarian or Lou- 
isiana lack the delicate accuracy of the stories just 
named, and if her well-known and enjoyable juve- 
nile, Little Lord Faimtleroy^ is hardly to be chroni- 
cled in a history of literature, she gave in That 
Lass 0' Lowrie's (1877) a novel of life in the Lan- 
cashire mines of England that shows great power 
of plot and description, and is remarkable for its 
mastery of the dialect and customs of an unfamiliar 



region. 



II. William Dean Howells, in his best novel, 
A Modern Lnstance (1882), and in such other stories 
as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884), applies to the 
telling of a long tale the accurate and synthetic 
realism shown by the short-story writers just 
named. A keen observer, familiar with American 
life in many phases, versed in contemporary foreign 
literature, and conspicuously influenced by Tour- 
gueneff, or even by Henry James, Jr., his sharpness 



92 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

of vision and firmness of touch have nevertheless 
given his novels an original character of their own, 
and have entitled him to be called, in his humor 
and in his descriptive power, the best literary 
painter of contemporary American life among the 
''better" classes — in both senses of the quoted 
adjective. Born at Martinsville, Ohio, in 1837, he 
was a country editor until i860, when he wrote a 
campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, which 
had a great circulation during that year, and which, 
as literature, was nearly as good as Hawthorne's 
life of Pierce. In 1861 Mr. Howells was given the 
politically unimportant consulate at Venice. Never 
did an author make better literary use of his posi- 
tion, at the same time faithfully performing its offi- 
cial duties. Not until his return, in 1865, did he 
begin to publish the fruits of his Italian sight-see- 
ings. Venetian Life appeared in 1866, and Italian 
Joiirneys the next year. Their descriptions were 
faithful, and their literary style pleasing. After a 
brief period of journalistic work in New York, Mr. 
Howells went to Boston as an assistant editor of 
The Atlantic Mo?itkly, the controlling editorship of 
which he assumed on the retirement of James T. 
Fields, in 187 1. Suhii7'ba?i Sketches (187 1) did for 
Cambridge what Venetian Zi/e had done for Venice, 
— though its descriptions of the university town 
were less direct, — and included many pieces of 
delicate humor and not a few delightful character- 
sketches. Every one of Mr. Howells's books, thus 



II E.VRY JAMES, JA\ 93 

far, liad increased his public of readers; but Their 
Wedduig Jourjiey (1872) multiplied them anew, 
and gave its readers a story as faidiful in its topo- 
graphical descriptions as it was illuminating in the 
kindly humor of its portrayals of character. A 
Chance Acquaintance and A Foregone Conclusion^ 
two other novels, were equally successful in tiie 
same vein. Of his too numerous later novels the 
most significant have been The Lady of the A?'oos- 
took, The Undiscovered Coimtry, A Fearful Responsi- 
bility^ Ap?^il Hopes ^ and y^ Hazard of New Fortunes. 
Mr. Howells has also collected into book-form 
some of his numerous criticisms of contemporay 
European literature and character, and is the au- 
thor of many bright comedies, chiefly turning on 
the minor mishaps of life. In i860 a volume called 
Foems of Two Friends was written by Mr. Howells 
in conjunction with J. J. Piatt ; and he has never 
ceased to publish verse that may be aptly charac- 
terized by the title of the latest collection, Stops of 
Various Quills (1895). His mark upon American 
poetry, however, has been less noteworthy than 
that which he has made upon the fiction of his 
time. 

12. Henry James, Jr., like Bret Harte, has long 
been a European resident, but must be classed 
among American authors. As far as cool reti- 
cence of unimpassioned delineation is concerned, 
he w^as the earliest of the later school of American 
"realists," though "realism," at its best, is as old 



94 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TUKE. 

as the Canterbury Tales, and ought to be as vital. 
Mr. James describes men's ways and words, and 
leaves the reader to infer their character therefrom. 
A Passio7iate Fllg7^wi contains the best of the mag- 
azine stories he wrote during his earUer years. Of 
his longer novels, Roderick Hiidso7i^ The American^ 
Watch a7td IVai^d^ and The Portrait of a Lady^ are 
like highly finished statuettes, clear-cut and cold. 
Mr. James never works in the '' large manner." Of 
his later novels, The Eii7'opeans and Washington 
Square show a lack of that finish by which his first 
successes were won. Some warmth of human sym- 
pathy appears i^n certain of his shorter stories, ris- 
ing into pathos in The Author of Beltraffio and The 
Death of the Lion. Of all his works, however, The 
Bostonians is the ablest and the most representa- 
tive, and should be read by those who would famil- 
iarize themselves with the best art of a writer who 
views the ^' procession of life " in a mood of devi- 
talized coolness, but shows — within self-assigned 
limits — an honesty of portrayal not less marked 
than that of the sympathetic delineators of Ameri- 
can folk-life. 

13. Edward Eggleston, born in Indiana in 
1837, found a special field in novels of pioneer life 
in the uncivilized outposts of the new west. His 
first mature years were those of a Methodist itiner- 
ant and Sunday-school worker. One or two books 
for children showed his 'prentice hand, but his first 
general recognition as a vigorous American novel- 



ROMANTICISTS. g5 

ist followed the publication of The Hoosier School- 
master^ in 187 1. The End of the World ^ The Mys- 
tery of Metropolisville^ and 77ie Circuit Rider^ later 
stories, similarly described to the letter the rough 
backwoods experiences of the hardy settlers of 
fourscore years ago. These novels became popular 
in Europe, their vividness of description and unfa- 
miliarity of subject proving no less interesting to 
German readers than were Fenimore Cooper's In- 
dian tales at the time of their first appearance. 

14. George W. Cable, in the deliberateness of 
his literary art, and his consequent slowness of pro- 
duction, is exceptional among the inveterate nov- 
elists of his time. One collection of short stories, 
four novels, and a novelette form his contribution 
to American fiction between 1879 and 1895. Of 
these the first. Old C7'eole Days, remains the best 
and most characteristic volume ; it took for its own 
a romantic field, and gave perpetuity to a passing 
time. The life of New Orleans, with its French 
and Spanish historical legacies, its American polit- 
ical allegiance, its mixed races and problematic 
characters, its sharp contrasts between commercial 
prosperity and the bitterness of conquest in the 
civil war, its picturesque commingling of aristo- 
cracy and plebeianism, is set forth naturally and 
artistically in Cable's stories. In its union of pa- 
thos, humor, strength, and delicacy, T)r, Sevier is 
the most commendable of the author's longer tales. 

15. Romanticists. — In the broad range of later 



96 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LTTERATURE. 

American fiction, many writers, of course, have 
looked for their themes in historical, religious, ro- 
mantic, or even political fields. The novel and 
the newspaper are, in recent times, the chief pur- 
veyors of amusement, or even of didactic instruc- 
tion ; and the story-teller scans the universe, from 
zenith to nadir, in search of some new thing. A 
few novelists may be grouped under the romantic 
head, merely because their subjects have been 
other than the real life of contemporaneous society. 
During the civil war, a new but not enduring 
movement in American fiction was begun by the 
tales of Theodore Winthrop, a native of Connecti- 
cut and a graduate of Yale College, who was killed 
in the first set engagement of the war, at Big 
Bethel, Virginia, on June lo, 1861. He had written 
a few spirited magazine sketches, and at his death 
three complete novels and a number of minor pa- 
pers were found among his manuscripts. The novels 
Cecil Dreeine^ John Brent^ and Edwin Brothertoft 
are among the breeziest and heartiest of American 
works of fiction, and even their horses breathe a 
vital oxygen. The later literary fashion, how- 
ever, calls for more deliberation, and a more con- 
scious art, than Winthrop showed, even in his Cecil 
Dreeme^ which found .a romantic background in a 
now demolished college building in New York city, 
and a marplot in the editor of a metropolitan daily. 
At the same time Harriet Prescott (Mrs. Spofford) 
seemed likely to become notable among American 



ROMANTICISTS. 97 

story-tellers for splendor of style and almost un- 
healthy (though never impure) luxuriance of fancy. 
Sir Rohan's Ghost (1859), The Amber Gods (1863), 
and Azarian (1864) anticipated, in their spectacu- 
lar use of tone-color in words, some of the methods 
of the later French " symbolists." As the best 
example of her powers of construction and elabo- 
ration may be mentioned the story of Midsummer 
and May, in the Amber Gods volume. Not less 
clearly to be classed with the romancers are Julian 
Hawthorne and F. Marion Crawford, though both 
have founded some of their plots upon current 
events in every-day society. The former, a son of 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Boston in 1846, 
found his advancement hindered rather than aided 
by the circumstance of his birth. In his novels, 
Bressajit, Idolatry, Garth, Sebastian Strome, and 
Dust, and in his shorter stories, Mr. Hawthorne 
shows his father's fondness for psychological and 
weird themes ; but he is apt to treat them in a 
somew^hat sensational manner, and overcrowds his 
canvas with a confusion of figures. Of his numerous 
books, Archibald Malmaiso7i is the one most indi- 
vidual in thought and word, and most in consonance 
with the higher powers of the author, to whom, as 
to many romancers, the general theme of a dual 
life possesses a constant fascination. Crawford, of 
American ancestry and of Italian birth and resi- 
dence, illustrates in his books, even more than does 
Henry James, the fashion of the emigre, or cosmo- 



98 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

politan, or '^ man-without-a-country " novel, which 
has been a feature of recent American Uterature. 
He is at his worst when he seeks to present An 
American Politicia7i ; but the ItaHan Hfe of A Cigar- 
ette-Maker's Ro77tance or A Roman Singer he knows 
and pictures in an unquestionably pow^erful way. 
On the wdiole, however, he has never surpassed 
Mr. Isaacs^ a Tale of Modern India (1882), his first 
book, in which he introduced a character and an 
environment unknown in modern fiction. The 
stress of the demand for newness, in hterature is 
cruelly prohibitory of lasting renown based on solid 
work, but it occasionally produces what, in the 
strict sense of the word, is a novel. Many readers, 
whose religious imagination was stimulated by its 
new point of view of the world-tragedy, found in 
Lew Wallace's Ben Hur, a Tale of the Christ 
(1880), a vigorously written historical tale, in w^hich 
the strongest parts were the descriptions of Orien- 
tal leprosy and of an ancient chariot-race. Other 
novels of this fiction-making time, however, have 
been already forgotten, though circulated hardly 
less widely than the book just mentioned. 

16. Edward Everett Hale — preacher, pas- 
tor, philanthropist, editor, and author, born in Bos- 
ton in 1822, of a family w^ell known in the literary 
history of that city — has written a large number 
of very readable and ingenious stories, of which 
Te7i Times One is Ten is the longest, a tale made 
famous by the cheery motto of its hero, Harry 



AMERICAN HUMOR. 99 

Wadsworth. Dr. Hale's short sketch of A Afa?i 
without a Coimtry is the most remarkable piece of 
pure verisimihtude produced on this side of the 
water. It had a marked effect in strengthening 
the Northern arms during the war. The noble 
story Li His Na77ie has exerted a widespread and 
wholesome Christian influence. 

17. Louisa May Alcott, a daughter of Bronson 
Alcott, was the most popular of Amicrican writers 
of juveniles. Little IVomen (iS6j) ^itisimed quick 
popularity. Its success in describing girl-life lay 
in its entire freedom from artificiality and its cheer- 
iness of spirit. Miss Alcott's literary style was 
wholly natural, and she seemed to take genuine 
pleasure in the characters she created. The bright 
New England boy and girl Miss Alcott knew very 
w^ell^ and her light humor and fertility of invention 
made her other books for the young almost equal 
favorites ; for their merit is nearly uniform, and 
their readers are of all ages. Miss Alcott's con- 
siderable novel of Work, and her stories and 
sketches of adult life, never won the success for 
which their author hoped. She died in 1888. 

18. American Humor. — There has never been 
any lack of humor in American literature, from the 
time of Richard Alsop and the Hartford wits down 
to the latest newspaper paragraphs. It has been 
individual rather than general, and its rapidity of 
thought is its chief characteristic. Our lack of a 
literary centre has denied us any Punch or Fliegende 



100 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

Blatter^ but a really witty saying goes from East- 
port to San Francisco, and thus the jesters have 
been likely to find their public greater than their 
reputation, and reputation more generous than 
purse. Our later humorists have won their celeb- 
rity by the constant publication of longer sketches, 
good, bad, or indifferent, being only careful that 
the name go with the sketch, and that the sketch 
be individual enough and long enough to keep 
out of the promiscuous limbo of popular quota- 
tion. Charles Farrar Browne (" Artemus Ward ") 
was born at Waterford, Maine, in 1834. His hu- 
rhor was of an uneven quality, and was often coarse ; 
but toward the last of his life he so ripened and 
mellowed that his popular nickname of " Artemus 
the delicious " was not wholly inappropriate. He 
first popularized misspelling in America, and in 
view of this fact we may call his best saying the 
remark that "Chaucer was a great poet, but he 
couldn't spell." Browne won much success as a 
lecturer, and died in England in 1867, having made 
himself a favorite in London, where he served for a 
little time on the staff of Punch. Henry W. Shaw^ 
('^Josh Billings"), born in Massachusetts in 1818, 
is chiefly known as the Avriter of proverbs and 
aphorisms, in wdiich wdt and wisdom are neatly 
combined. They are, like Artemus Ward's sayings, 
in phonetic spelling, but gain nothing by their pre- 
sentation in uncouth form. David Ross Locke was 
born in Vestal, Broome County, New York, in 1833, 



AMERICAN HUMOR. • loi 

and in his early years led a varied life as a country 
printer and editor. In i860 he began the publica- 
tion of letters by ^' Petroleum V. Nasby," an origi- 
nal character, whose epistles became famous dur- 
ing the war, and exerted a considerable political 
influence. Locke was the chief political satirist 
of the time, and Nasby, wdiether pastor, reformer, 
w^orkingman, or member of society, is a constant 
caricature of the ideas for which he stands. Unlike 
other national satirical humorists taking public 
affairs for their theme, Locke was facile in turning to 
the most recent questions wdth unabated strength 
and undimmed humor. Samuel Langhorne Clemens 
(^' Mark Twain "), like several other humorists, 
first attracted attention in California. The Lino- 
cents Abroad^ a burlesque history of the absurd 
doings of a somewhat whimsical expedition which 
had really visited the Mediterranean countries, 
won thousands of readers ; and Roughifig It., The 
Adventures of Toni Sawyer., and The Gilded Age 
(with Charles Dudley Warner) were not less suc- 
cessful. The qualities of Mr. Clemens's style are 
peculiar, slyness and adroitness in jesting being 
prominent, so that the reader is treated to a suc- 
cession of surprises. A notable absence of refine- 
ment, however, exists in the jocose writing of all 
these humorists, though Clemens, in some serious 
or semi-romantic tales, drops his elsewhere inveter- 
ate roughness and obviousness of attack on the 
readers' risibilities. Frank R. Stockton, however, 



102 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

in his dry drolleries in the form of stories, — of 
which the best are Rudder Grange and The Casting 
Away of Mrs, Leeks a?id Mrs. Aleshine, — relies 
upon nothing save clever absurdities of situation 
and humorous suggestions of thought and charac- 
ten 

19. Charles Djdley Warner, too, is a humor- 
ist of a more delicate type than those just men- 
tioned, and likewise has addressed a wide public 
through his work as an essayist and a novelist. 
He was born in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in 1829, 
and graduated at Hamilton College in 185 1. My 
Suminer in a Garden^ a series of delightful sketches 
of amateur horticulture, first made him famous. 
Back-log Studies., domestic and moral reflections, 
was less popular, but equally good. Baddeck^ and 
lliat Sort of T/iiiig followed, being an account of a 
trip to the provinces of British North America. Its 
little bits of fun and humor are scattered all through 
the book, and are to be enjoyed in proportion to 
the reader's own tastes. Afummies and Moslems.^ 
In the Levant., and Saimterings similarly, though a 
little more soberly, illuminate life in Oriental and 
European countries visited by the author. In 
Being a Boy (1877) Mr. Warner draws the New 
England youngster to the life. 

20. Essayists. — The development of culture in 
the United States and the multiplication of peri- 
odicals have promoted not only the short story, 
already mentioned, but also the signed or anony- 



ESSAYISTS. 103 

mous magazine article, — slighter or more ephem- 
eral in theme and value, perhaps, than Irving's 
essays, and certainly less weighty than Emerson's, 
but often agreeable and suggestive. From ZT^r- 
per' s Magazine {\% ^6) have been collected an entire 
series of such papers, by Curtis, Warner, Higgin- 
son, and others ; while Putnam's Monthly (1853), 
The Atlantic Monthly (1857), and The Century 
(1870) have been storehouses of literary material. 
James T. Fields, of Boston, — once editor as well 
as publisher of the Atlantic^ — perhaps enjoyed the 
acquaintance of more English and American au- 
thors than any other of our writers, and he pre- 
served some of his entertaining reminiscences in 
Yesterdays with Authors. In Underbrush (1877) 
are contained his lighter essays and sketches. 
Mary Abigail Dodge ('^ Gail Hamilton '') was the 
author of many volumes of bright essays on a great 
variety of current topics. Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
ginson, a descendant of one of the most ancient 
of Massachusetts families, is chiefly known as an 
essayist, magazinist, and reviewer, though he has 
been novelist, historian, and poet. He is an espe- 
cially pleasant companion in his Out-Door Papers 
(1863) and Oldport Days (i^'j^)^ volumes made up 
chiefly of articles concerning this or that phase of 
out-door life. In Atla?itic Essays (1871) there is a 
greater proportion of papers on classical or literary 
subjects. Colonel Higginson was at the head of a 
colored regiment between 1862 and 1864, having 



104 A PRIMER OF AMERICA AT LITER A TURE. 

been all his life an active opponent of slavery. 
Army Life in a Black Regimejit (1870) details his 
South Carolina experiences. In his Young Folks^ 
History of the United States (1875), ^^^ ^^ ^^^s 
Larger LListo?y of the United States (1885), he pre- 
sents, within small compass, a readable and impartial 
story of the growth of the country. A similar facil- 
ity of application of literary intelligence is shown 
in the varied work of Horace E. Scudder, the suc- 
cessor of Lowell, Fields, Howells, and Aldrich in 
the editorship of the Atlantic. As representatives 
of his best writing in several lines may be men- 
tioned the dainty juvenile, Drea?7i Children (1864), 
the volume of brief Stories and Romances (1880), 
and the mature studies oi Men and Letters (1887). 
Like Fiske and Higginson, he has also success- 
fully popularized various themes in American his- 
tory and biography. One cannot mention, in this 
general division of later American literature^ many 
such contributions to biographical criticism — a 
department of writing closely connected with the 
essay — as W. P. Trent's life of lVillia?n Gilmore 
Simms (the best portrayal of ante-bclluin Southern 
society) ; George E. Woodberry's cool study of the 
life and character of Poe, which forms the introduc- 
tion to the final edition (1895) of the works of that 
author; or Thomas R. Lounsbury's illuminating life 
of James Fcnimore Cooper ; but Professor Louns- 
bury's able and exhaustive Studies in Chaucer 
should be named as the largest contribution to the 



RECENT HISTORIANS. 105 

literature of criticism made in this country since 
Tick nor 's History of Spanish Literature, Another 
essayist, who must be here mentioned as the dean 
of the later and numerous body of observers who 
have written on nature and natural history in a 
way combining scientific accuracy with agreeable- 
ness of literary form, is John Burroughs, whose 
Wake-Robin, Winter Sunshine^ and Signs and Sea- 
sons entitle him to be called the legitimate suc- 
cessor of Thoreau. 

21. Recent Historians. — James Parton, a na- 
tive of England but long a resident of America, 
devoted the greater part of his literary life to the 
production of historical biographies of prominent 
men, written after a collation of authorities, but 
addressed to the popular taste in their fluent style 
and attractive allusion. Aaron Burr, Andrew 
Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, 
General Butler, and Horace Greeley he thus por- 
trayed in books of considerable size, while other 
volumes comprehensively included similar bio- 
graphical sketches of less length. Mr. Parton like- 
wise wrote an elaborate life of Voltaire. He died 
in 1891. John Fiske, the son of a brilliant littera- 
teur of Hartford, graduated at Harvard in 1864, 
and immediately won reputation as a student of 
modern philosophy. In his Outlines of Cos7nic Phi- 
losophy is presented a better exposition of the 
Spencerian system than one gets from a casual 
reading of Herbert Spencer himself. Myths and 



io6 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

Myth-Makers is a volume in which folk-lore is ex- 
plained according to modern scientific principles. 
In The U?tsee?t Worlds and other Essays are literary 
reviews and able musical criticisms. The Destinv 
of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origi?t, and The 
Idea of God, as affected by Moderii K7iowIedge, are 
original and helpful arguments in proof of personal 
immortality and of theism, as studied by an evolu- 
tionist. Mr. Fiske's largest and most valuable lit- 
erary achievement, however, consists of his several 
volumes on American history, which, viewed com- 
prehensively, form an original, clear, and interesting 
introductory statement of the sources and devel- 
opment of life in the United States. Those pub- 
lished up to the Columbus year of 1892 were, in 
order of appearance : The Critical Period of A7ner- 
ican History (1888), The Beginnings of A'eiv E^ig- 
land {\%Zcj), The American Revolution (189 1), and 
The Discovery of America, with Soine Account of 
Ancient Ajnerica and the Spanish Conquest (1892). 
Of these the first-named, covering the period be- 
tween 1783 and 1789, is peculiarly lucid and useful. 
Henry Cabot Lodge's Short History of the English 
Colonies in A?nerica describes, in a popular way, 
the birth and growth of our colonial life, and may, 
like Mr. Fiske's historical works, be read as intro- 
ductory to the study of American literature. More 
tliorougli and weighty is Moses Coit Tyler's His- 
tory of American Literature to 1765, which not only 
describes and analyzes many rare or significant 



RECENT HISTORIANS. 107 

productions of colonial pens, but fully discusses 
the social, political, educational, and religious con- 
ditions out of which they came. Henry Adams' 
History of the United States, in nine volumes, cov- 
ers the two administrations of Jefferson and Madi- 
son respectively, or the period from 1801 to 1817 : 
it is written in a passionless style, and is chiefly 
valuable as the final viev/ of the war of 18 12 taken 
by a descendant of the New England Federalists, 
wdio has fully investigated the documents and 
printed writings of the period. James Schouler's 
History of fhe United States under the Constitutio7i^ 
in five compact volumes, does not exhibit many 
charms of literary style, but, for the whole period 
between 1789 and 1861, forms a useful supplement 
to Bancroft. Facile and readable, but not im- 
plicitly to be accepted in all its off-hand state- 
ments, is John Bach McMaster's History of the 
People of the United States, still in course of publi- 
cation. An admirable digest of the voluminous 
newspaper and documentary literature of the later 
antislavery and civil-w^ar struggle is presented in 
James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States 
from the Compromise of 1850, of w^hich the third 
volume, bringing the record down to 1862, appeared 
in 1895. 

As one follows the highway of American litera- 
ture to the close of the nineteenth century, the 
mountain-peaks are left behind, but the table-land 



ToS A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

is high. If no authors of the first rank remain, 
there are yet many faithful workers whose success- 
ful service would have been impossible without the 
pioneer toils of those who have gone before. 



HELPS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 

Smyth's Bayard Taylor may be read for its story of the 
sentimental period in American literature, as well as the rise 
of the group of younger poets following Longfellow. 

Trent's William Gilmore Si?nms and Woodrow Wilson's 
Division and Reunion give the best material for the study of 
Southern society as affecting literary conditions before and 
after the war. 

Stedman's Poets of America is the largest and best account 
of American poets and their works, and is valuable not only 
for its criticisms, but for its biographical and bibliographical 
data. 



A COURSE OF READING 

IN THE MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN 
LITERATURE. 

Politics and Statecraft : 

Declaration of Independence. 
Constitution of the United States. 
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay's Federalist. 
Washington's Farewell Address. 

Webster's Great Speeches and Orations (Whipple's one- 
volume edition). 
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. 
" Second Inaugural. 

History and Biography : 

Franklin's Autobiography. 

Irving's Washington (unabridged or abridged by Fiske). 
Bancroft's History of the United States. 
Parkman's La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 
West. 
" Montcalm and Wolfe. 
Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella. 

" Conquest of Mexico. 

Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. 

" History of the United Netherlands. 
Essays and Criticism : 

Irving's Sketch-Book (also im.portant in fiction). 

Bracebridge Hall ('' a medley "). 
Emerson's Essays (first and second series). 

" Society and SoHtude. 

Lowell's Among my Books. 
" My Study Windows. 



no A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 

Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
Stedman's Nature and Elements of Poetry. 
Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature. 
Travel and Description ; 

Irving's Crayon Miscellany. 
Longfellow's Outre-Mer. 
Emerson's English Traits. 
Hawthorne's Our Old Home. 
Thoreau's Walden. 

'* Cape Cod. 
Lowell's Fireside Travels. 
Poetry : 

Freneau's House of Night (in the Poems of 1786, re- 
printed, London, 1861 ; out of print in both forms). 
Barlow's Columbiad. 

Miscellaneous Poems from the United States Literary 
Gazette, 1826 (rare, but very valuable, if accessible, as 
a study of poetical beginnings). 
Drake's Culprit Fay. 
Halleck's Marco Bozzaris. 

<' On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake. 
Bryant's Thanatopsis. 

To a Waterfowl. 
" Monument Mountain. 
" Forest Hymn. 
" To the Fringed Gentian. 
** The Planting of the Apple-Tree, 
" The Flood of Years. 
" The Twenty-second of February. 
Longfellow's Voices of the Night. 
*' Evangeline. 

" Hiawatha. 

" Tales of a Wayside Inn, Part I. 

" Morituri Salutamus. 

" Woods in Winter. 

" Resignation. 



A COURSE OF READING, in 

Longfellow's The Rainy Day. 

The Children's Hour. 
" A Gleam of Sunshine. 

" The Day is Done. 

" Something Left Undone. 

" Excelsior. 

The Bells of Lynn. 
" The Building of the Ship. 

" The Ladder of St. Augustine. 

'* The Arrow and the Song. 

" The Chamber over the Gate. 

** Victor and Vanquished. 

Poe's Poems (entire). 

Emerson's Poems (entire, but slowly and progressively). 
Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal. 
" Biglow Papers. 
*' Commemoration Ode. 
" After the Burial. 
The Miner. 
The First Snow-Fall. 
'* Auf Wiedersehen. 
Whittier's Snow-Bound. 
Maud Muller. 
*' Barbara Frietchie. 

*' Skipper Ireson's Ride. 

" In School Days. 

" Laus Deo. 

*' Farewell of a Virginia Slave-Mother, 

" The Pipes at Lucknow. 

" The Dead Ship of Plarpswell. 

" My Psalm. 

" Saint Gregory's Guest. 

Holmes' The Last Leaf. 

'* The Chambered Nautilus. 
" Old Ironsides. 
'' The Deacon's Masterpiece. 
" ^Estivation. 



112 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LIIERATURE, 



Holmes' Questions and Answers. 
The Boys. 
A Sun-Day Hymn. 
Hymn of Trust. 
The Voiceless. 
Homesick in Heaven. 
Fiction : 

Irving's Tales of a Traveller. 

The Alhambra. 
Cooper's The Deerslayer. 

The Last of the Mohicans. 
The Pathfinder. 
The Pioneers. 
The Prairie. 
The Pilot. 
The Spy. 
Poe's Ligeia. 

'* The Fall of the House of Usher. 
'' The Gold Bug. 
" The Black Cat. 
" The Pit and the Pendulum. 
" The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. 
" The Mystery of Marie Roget. 
'* The Murders in the Rue Morgue. 
" Hop-Frog. 

*' The Unparalleled Adventures of one Hans Pfaal. 
" The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. 
Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (including the Snow- 
Image volume). 
*' Mosses from an Old Manse. 

" Tanglewood Tales. 

" The Wonder-Book. 

" The Scarlet Letter. 

" The House of the Seven Gables. 

** The Marble Faun. 

Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
*' '^ Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

OF SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE DEVELOP- 
MENT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.i 

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

1607. Settlement of Jamestown. 

1620. Settlement of Plymouth. 

1630. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation begun. 

Winthrop's History of New England begun. 

1636. First college (Harvard) in the northern colonies. 

1639. First printing-press in the colonies. 

1640. The Bay Psalm Book. 

1662. Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom. 

1663. Eliot's Indian Bible. 

1693. First college (William and Mary) in the southern 
colonies. 



1702 
1704 

^733 
1754 

1775 
1776 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. 

The Boston News-Letter (perhaps the first newspaper), 

Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac begun. 

Edwards' Freedom of the Will. 

Revolutionary war begun (treaty of peace 17S3). 

Declaration of Independence. 



^ In this table is presented no date, or event, or title not distinctly im- 
portant in the study of the growth of the American mind. Students and 
readers are confused, rather than helped, by the multiplication of names 
and dates. 



114 A PRIMER OF AMERICAX LITERATURE. 

17S6. Freneau's Poems. 

1788. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay*s The Federalist. 

1789. Constitutional government begun. 
Franklin's Autobiography. 

1796. Washington's Farewell Address. 

1798. Brown's Wieland (first considerable novel in America). 

NINETEENTH CENTURY, 

1807. Barlow's The Columbiad. 

1809. Irving's Knickerbocker's History of Nevv- York. 

181 2. War with England (treaty of i3eace 1814). 

181 5. The North American Review founded. 

1817. Bryant's Thanatopsis. 

1819. Irving's The Sketch-Book. 

1823. Cooper's The Pioneers. 

1830. Webster's Reply to Ha3-ne. 

1834. Bancroft's History of the United States begun (fin- 
ished 1874). 

1836. Emerson's Nature. 

1837. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. 
Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella. 

1839. Longfellow's Voices of the Night. 

1840. Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 

1841. Emerson's Essays. 

1843. Webster's second Bunker Hill Oration. 
1845. Poe's The Raven and Other Poems. 

Mexican war begun (treaty of peace 1848). 

1847. Longfellow's Evangeline. 
Emerson's Poems. 

1848. Lowell's A Fable for Critics. 

" The Biglow Papers. 

1849. Whittier's Voices of Freedom. 

1850. Hawthorne*s The Scarlet Letter. 
1852. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
1855. Longfellow's Evangeline. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 115 

1856. Motley's The Rise of the Dutch Republic. 

1858. Holmes' The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

i860. Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. 

1861. Civil war begun (ended 1865). 

1865. Parkman's Pioneers of France in the New World 
(first part of France and England in North America, 
series finished 1892). 
Whittier's Snow-Bound. 

1870. Beginning of development of short story of local life 
(most characteristic feature of later American lit- 
erature). 



INDEX. 



Page 

Adams, Henry (1838- ) 107 

Adams, John (1735-1826) 18 

Agassiz, Louis (1807-1873) 75 

Alcott, Amos Bronson (1799-1888) 72 

Alcott, Louisa May (1833-1888) 99 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836- ) 82 

Allen, EHzabeth Akers (1832- ) ?>7 

Audubon, John James (1780-1851) 75 

Bancroft, George (1800-1891) 57 

Barlow, Joel (1754-1812) 22 

Beecher, Henry Ward (1813-1887) 29 

Boker, George Henry (1823-1890) 55 

Bradford, William (1589-1657) 9 

Bradstreet, Anne (1612-1672) 9 

Brainard, John Gardiner Calkins (i 796-1 828) 38 

Brooks, PhiUips (1835-1893) 29 

Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810) 23 

Browne, Charles Farrar (1834-1867) 100 

Bryant, William Cullen (l 794-1878) , 39 

Burnett, Frances Hodgson (1849- ) 91 

Burroughs, John (1837- ) i^S 

Bushnell, Horace (1802-1876) 29 

Cable, George Washington (1844- ) 95 

Calhoun, John Caldwell (1782-1850) 56 

Carleton, William (1845- ) 86 

Gary, Alice (1820-1871) 56 

C^ry, Phoebe (1824-1871) 56 



ii8 INDEX. 

Channing, William Ellery (1780-1842) 28 

Channing, William Ellery, 2d (1818- ) 72 

Child, Lydia Maria (1802-1880) 73 

Choate, Rufus (1799-1859) 56 

Clarke, James Freeman (1810-1888) 29 

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (1835- ) loi 

Cooke, John Esten (1830-1886) 68 

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851) 62 

Crawford, Francis Marion (1845- ) 97 

Curtis, George William (1824-1892) ^^ 

Dana, Richard Henry (1787-1879) ^^ 

Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. (1815-1882) ^t^ 

Deming, Philander (1829- ) 90 

Dodge, Mary Abigail (1830-1896) 103 

Drake, Joseph Rodman (i 795-1820) 36 

Dwight, Timothy (1752-1817) 12 

Edwards, Jonathan (1703-1758) 10 

Eggleston, Edward (1837- ) 94 

Eliot, John (1604-1690) 6 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) 69 

Everett, Edward (1794-1865) 56 

Field, Eugene (1850-1895) 86 

Fields, James Thomas (1816-1881) 103 

Finch, Francis Miles (1827- ) 85 

Fiske, John (1842- ) 105 

Folger, Peter ( 1618-1690) 9 

Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790) 13 

Freneau, Phihp (1752-1832) 22 

Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850) 74 

Furness, Horace Howard (1833- ) 75 

Gilder, Richard Watson (1844- ) 86 

Gray, Asa (1810-1888) 75 

Greele}^ Horace (1811-1872) "j^ 

Greene, Albert Gorton (1802-1868) ^^ 



INDEX. 119 

Hale, Edward Everett (1822- ) 98 

Halleck, Fitz-Greene (1790-1867) -t^'^ 

Hamilton, Alexander (i 757-1804) 20 

Harris, Joel Chandler (1848- ) 90 

Harte, Francis Bret (1839- ) '^'j 

Hawthorne, Julian (1846- ) 97 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864) 64 

Hay, John (1838- ) 86 

Hayne, Paul Hamilton (1830-1886) 85 

Henry, Patrick (1736-1799) 18 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823- ) 103 

ilildreth, Richard (1807-1865) 61 

Hillhouse, James Abraham (1789-1841) 38 

Holland, Josiah Gilbert (1819-1881) 74 

Holmes, Abiel (1763-1837) 24 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894) 48 

Hooker, Thomas (1586-1674) 4 

Hopkins, Mark (1802-1887) 29 

Hopkins, Samuel (1751-1803) 12 

Hopkinson, Francis (1737-1791) 22 

Howe, Julia Ward (1819- ) 85 

Howells, William Dean (1837- ) 91 

Irving, Peter (1771-1838) 30 

Irving, Washington (1783-1859) 30 

Irving, Wilham (1766-1821) 31 

Jackson, Helen Fiske (1831-1885) 87 

James, Henry (1811-1882) 29 

James, Henry, Jr. (1843- ) 93 

Jay, John (1745-1829) 20 

Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826) 19 

Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849- ) 89 

Judd, Sylvester (1813-1853) 68 

Kennedy, John Pendleton (1795-1870) 68 

Kent, James (1763-1847) 74 

Key, Francis Scott (1779-1843) 38 



120 INDEX. 

Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881) 85 

Larcom, Lucy (1826-1893) 87 

Leland, Charles Godfrey (1824- ) 86 

Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865) 79 

Locke, David Ross (1833-1888) -. . 100 

Lodge, Henry Cabot (1850- ) 106 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882) 41 

Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford (1838- ) 104 

Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891) 50 

Madison, James (1751-1836) 20 

Marsh, George Perkins (1801-1882) 75 

Marshall, John (1755-1835) 24 

Mather, Cotton (1663-1728) 4 

Mather, Increase (1639-1723) 4 

McMaster, John Bach (1852- ) .107 

Melville, Herman (1819-1891) 68 

Miller, Joaquin (1841- ) 86 

Mitchell, Donald Grant (1822- ) 74 

Morton, Nathaniel (1613-1685) 9 

Motley, John Lothrop (i 814-1877) 59 

Murfree, Mary Noailles (1850- ) 90 

Nicolay, John George (1832- ) 78 

Otis, James (1725-1783) 18 

Paine, Robert Treat, Jr. (1773-1811) 22 

Paine, Thomas (1737-1809) 21 

Palfrey, John Gorham (1796-1881) 61 

Parker, Theodore (1810-1860) 29 

Parkman, Francis (1823-1893) 60 

Parsons, Thomas William (1819-1892) 55 

Parton, James (1822-1891) 105 

Paulding, James Kirke (1779-1860) 35 

Payne, John Howard (1792-1852) 38 

Peirce, Benjamin (1809-1880) 75 

Percival, James Gates (1795-1856). . .- 55 



INDEX. 121 

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart (1844- ) 9° 

Phillips, Wendell (1811-1884) 5^ 

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849) 53 

Prescott, William Hickling (1796-1859) 58 

Prince, Thomas (1687-1758) 16 

Ouincy, Josiah, Jr. (l744-i775) ^^ 

Read, Thomas Buchanan (1822-1872) 85 

Rhodes, James Ford (1848- ) 107 

Riley, James Whitcomb (1854- ) 86 

Ryan, Abram Joseph (i 839-1 886) 85 

Sands, Robert Charles (1799-1832) 40 

Sandys, George (1577-1643) 4 

Saxe, John Godfrey (1816-1887) 56 

Schouler, James (1829- ) 107 

Scudder, Horace Elisha (1838- ) 104 

Sewall, Samuel (1652-1730) 16 

Shaw, Henry Wheeler (1818-1885) 100 

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley (1791-1865) 56 

Simms, William Gilmore (1806-1870) 68 

Smith, John (1579-163 1) 8 

Sparks, Jared (1789-1866) 62 

Spofford, Harriet Prescott (1835- ) 9^ 

Sprague, Charles (1791-1875) 38 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833- ) 81 

Stephens, Alexander Hamilton (1812-1883) *]'^ 

Stith, William (1689-1755) 16 

Stockton, Francis Richard (1834- ) 101 

Stoddard, Richard Henry (1825- ) 81 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1812-1896) 68 

Stuart, Moses (1780-1852) 27 

Sumner, Charles (1811-1874) 56 

Taylor, Bayard (1825-1878) 80 

Thaxter, Celia (1836-1894) Zy 

Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862) 72 



122 INDEX. 

Ticknor, George (1791-1871) *]7, 

Timrod, Henry (1829-1867) 85 

Trowbridge, John Townsend (1827- ) 85 

Trumbull, John (1750-1831) 22 

Tyler, Moses Coit (1835- ) 106 

Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin (1786-1870) .40 

Very, Jones (1813-1880) 72 

Wallace, Lew. (1827- ) 98 

Ward, Nathaniel (1578 ?-i652) 8 

Warner, Charles Dudley (1829- ) 102 

Warner, Susan (1819-1885) 69 

Washington, George (1732-1799) 18 

Webster, Daniel (1782-1852) 56 

Webster, Noah (1758-1843) 75 

Wheatley, PhiUis (1753-1784) 22 

Whipple, Edwin Percy ( 1819-1886) ^-t^ 

Whitman, Walt (1819-1892) 84 

Whitney, William Dwight (1827- 1894) 75 

Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-1892) 45 

Wigglesworth, Michael (1631-1705) 9 

Wilde, Richard Henry (1789-1847) ^Z 

Wilkins, Mary E. (18 - ) 90 

Williams, Roger (i6oo?-i683) 7 

Willis, Nathaniel Parker (1806-1867) 55 

Wilson, Alexander (1766-1813) 24 

Wilson, Henry (1812-1875) 78 

Winthrop, John (1588-1649) 8 

Winthrop, Robert Charles (1809-1894) 56 

Winthrop, Theodore (1828-1861) 96 

Wirt, William (1772-1834) 24 

Woodberry, George Edward (1855- ) 104 

Woodworth, Samuel (1785-1842) 38 

Woolman, John (1720-1772) 16 

Woolson, Constance Fenimore (i 848-1894) 90 

Worcester, Joseph Emerson (1784-1865) 75 



APPENDIX. 



PORTRAITS AND HOMES 

OF 

BRYANT LOWELL 

LONGFELLOW HAWTHORNE 

WHTTTIER STOWE 

HOLMES EMERSON 




'XtCOyT^iy 




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THE CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE 



WashifigtofCs Headquarters and Lo7igfello'w'' s Home 




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